When lawyers take over an economy--feeding off federal regulations and rules--you get a society afraid to innovate and, hence, to progress. Instead of holding businesses to account, heavy regulation inspires litigation and frightens investors. Even the "funny papers" are serious.
Dodd-Frank is at least as big a regulatory burden as Obamacare, and at least as unpredictable in its applications. Arbitrary government is tyranny because anything you do may be judged illegal by regulators who have been handed vast powers that are only vaguely defined. What we have is something only a bit less, creeping authoritarianism.
Peter J. Wallison, at AEI, is the leading critic of Dodd-Frank. In a piece for The American Spectator he warns that anything less than wholesale repeal will leave Dodd-Frank as a dead weight on economic growth. When liberty is punished everyone gets hurt soon enough.
