Review of Catherine Crier’s The Case Against Lawyers: Down With Bureaucracy!:

“It was a few years ago, sitting in a barber’s chair, that I came face to face with the niggling over-regulation of American life. When it came time to trim my neck hairs with a straight razor, my barber used his fingers to smear a cold, anemic, trickly, machine-made substance on my skin. What, I asked him, happened to shaving brushes and hot, thick lather? New health-code regulations, he replied. Using a brush and shaving soap in a nice porcelain mug had been decreed illegal.

Catherine Crier in The Case Against Lawyers doesn’t cite that example as she makes her main point: that we the people have ceded power to a corps of lawyers and bureaucrats who are not only smothering us in silly regulations, but are also seizing huge profits for themselves, corrupting the political system and generally undermining freedom and the sense of responsibility. But Ms. Crier, the television newscaster who is currently host of “Catherine Crier Live” on Court TV, doesn’t lack for illustrations. Her book is a kind of lament from within the commonsensical heart of the American spirit.” NY Times