Hazlitt’s essay is a short political-economic polemic, originally published in The Freeman, on legislative proliferation in the United States. Its scope is not a technical jurisprudence but a civic-economic indictment: modern government, he argues, has moved far beyond the limited function of preventing aggression and coordinating conduct, and has become an ever-expanding apparatus of prohibitions, compulsions, agencies, regulations, costs, and dependency.
There are just too many laws.
The essay’s central conceptual move is to define law not sentimentally as reform, but operationally as command. Hazlitt distinguishes the few laws that create common standards or peaceful coordination from the many that impose new obligations or restraints.
Most laws are prohibitions or compulsions—in short, commands.
This definition allows him to treat the multiplication of statutes as a direct pressure on liberty. Traffic laws provide his model of legitimate law: rules that apply generally and permit people to anticipate one another’s actions. But once law ceases to prevent aggression and begins directing private choices, its growth becomes cumulative and self-justifying.
Hazlitt then gives the essay historical depth by turning to Herbert Spencer’s 1854 attack on “overlegislation.” The point is not antiquarian. Hazlitt uses Spencer to show that even a society often remembered as laissez-faire was already burdened by state activism, and that the nineteenth-century complaint now applies with greater force. Spencer’s warning is reduced to a principle of institutional overload:
"It is in the very nature of things," he continued, "that an agency employed for two purposes must fulfill both imperfectly."
From there the essay becomes a deliberately overwhelming inventory. Hazlitt moves from state legislatures to Congress, from municipal ordinances to independent agencies, from pages of codes to paperwork burdens and compliance costs. New York and California pass hundreds or thousands of laws in a few years; Congress produces hundreds more; agencies generate regulations whose volume dwarfs formal statutes. His statistics are meant to make ignorance of the law appear not merely common but structurally inevitable.
No one is excused from not knowing what every one of these new laws commands.
The essay’s force lies in making number itself politically meaningful. Hazlitt anticipates the objection that one should distinguish good laws from bad laws, but replies that proliferation is already a substantive evil: uncertainty, contradiction, compliance costs, bureaucratic discretion, and the erosion of settled expectations follow from constant rule-changing.
Every unnecessary law is itself bound to be pernicious.
His economic argument is closely tied to this legal argument. Regulation diverts capital, raises consumer prices, consumes administrative labor, delays innovation, and prices marginal workers out of employment. The costs are not only taxes visible in budgets, but concealed burdens embedded in homes, cars, forms, hiring decisions, and lost productivity. Hazlitt’s broader relevance is therefore as a public-choice and classical-liberal critique of interventionism: politicians promise benefits through bills; bureaucracies administer “programs”; citizens bear the dispersed costs.
The closing movement shifts from enumeration to warning. Hazlitt treats the growth of law as accelerative: each intervention generates failures, exceptions, enforcement needs, and demands for coordination, inviting still more intervention. His final concern is not inconvenience but regime transformation, the passage from law as a framework for freedom to law as an instrument of comprehensive direction.
How is it possible to talk of retaining our liberties, for example, when collectively we are subjected not only to thousands of prohibitions and compulsions but to daily increasing prohibitions and compulsions?
The essay remains relevant wherever administrative government expands faster than public comprehension or democratic accountability. Its thesis is stark: a free society cannot be preserved merely by debating isolated statutes one at a time, because the accumulated “torrent” changes the relation between citizen and state.
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