The Prophet deTocqueville

Egads.  The quoted stuff was written more than 100 years ago.

Toward the end of “Democracy in America” he warned against the government becoming “an immense tutelary power…absolute, detailed, regular…cover[ing] [society's] surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way.”

Tocqueville also foresaw exactly how this regulatory state would suffocate the spirit of free enterprise: “It rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces [the] nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”   --N Ferguson/WSJ quoted at ColdFury

The only thing he missed was the Omnipresent Eye of NSA/IRS.