For a good read, I’d recommend Tim Sandefur’s The Permission Society (Encounter, 2016). Sandefur is a lawyer at Arizona’s Goldwater Institute, and has stepped into Clint Bolick’s shoes as chief litigator on civil liberties issues after Clint was appointed to the Arizona Supreme Court. The book is about the sea change created by the regulatory state. Back when, if you wanted something done, you just did it. Not anymore. Now you have to have to get permission from a whole bunch of regulators, as anyone knows who tried to start a business or fix something simple in his house. The sheer cost of this explains why we’re less than an entrepreneurial society. But almost as bad is the sense that today we have to tug at our forelocks at out new masters, and that’s entirely inconsistent with the feeling that we’re in a free society. And that’s the subject of Sandefur’s splendid book.