More Laws, Less Freedom
Remembering Cicero’s Wisdom to Repeal CON Laws and Delete Old Regulations
In 44 BC — just months after Julius Caesar’s assassination—M. Tullius Cicero published De Officiis (On Duties), a set of reflections on moral responsibilities for honorable citizens and public officials. In the treatise, Cicero endeavors to revive a decayed and dilapidated republic rapidly metastasizing into an empire. Cicero’s contemporaries had a challenging task ahead: undo decades of constitutional erosion that resulted in a sprawling and incoherent law code and made the ascension of a god-emperor palatable and even necessary. Unfortunately, Cicero’s warnings came too late; the Roman Republic collapsed and, the same year that De Officiis was published, Cicero himself was assassinated.
Luckily, in America today, we have the luxury of heeding Cicero’s wisdom without facing the immediate risk of death or tyranny under a demigod. But there are some parallels: like the Romans of Cicero’s late republic, Americans endure the erosion of foundational constitutional structures at the hands of an ever-growing mountain of often incoherent laws and regulations. As Cicero succinctly states in Book I of De Officiis: “more law, less freedom.”1
At the Cicero Institute, this wisdom is core to our mission. In this piece, I will highlight two Cicero Institute policies that aim to strengthen freedom and human flourishing by eliminating harmful laws.
I. Repeal Certificate of Need Laws: More Law, More Death
In 38 states, captured oversight boards established by archaic “Certificate of Need” (CON) laws enable unelected bureaucrats to unilaterally block new entrants into healthcare markets. In practice, this means that the most innovative clinics, medical technologies, and healthcare delivery systems are blocked and deterred for most Americans.
Even in the best-case scenario, CON compliance requires application fees, lawyers, compliance consultants, and years of delays. Unsurprisingly, robust A-B tests in academic literature comparing CON states with non-CON states and pre-repeal vs post-repeal states find that CON laws dramatically increase preventable deaths and raise healthcare prices while reducing quality and access. When Florida partially repealed its CON laws in 2019, healthcare companies in the state announced 65 new hospitals to be constructed between 2020 and 2022.2 It’s time for other states to follow suit.
The Cicero Institute’s 50-state CON rankings report demonstrates where each state stands and what lawmakers must do to start chipping away at CON regulations.3 If bold leaders step up and fight CON, their states will enjoy new healthcare innovation, reduced prices, and improved quality and access.
II. Automatically Sunset Regulations: More Regulations, Less Growth
While unelected (and often un-fireable) executive branch bureaucrats have every incentive to mint new regulations—to expand their agency budgets, advance their careers, and propel their ideologies—all but four states lack a mechanism for systematic rule deletion. In some cases, outdated regulations cite statutes that are no longer on the books.
The result for citizens is economic deadweight losses (businesses crushed and deterred by an ever-growing compliance burden) and a breakdown of foundational separation of powers (executive branch bureaucrats equipped with legislative and judicial powers). This regulatory inertia—characterized by a mountain of regulations that only grows in each state—requires a greater and opposite force: bold leaders armed with good policy.
Specifically, the Cicero Institute advocates for the automatic expiration of rules on a strict statutory timeline. Each chapter of existing rulebooks must be assigned an expiration date, and all new rules must expire within eight years of first taking effect. If an agency wants to renew an expired rule, it must consult empirical metrics from the duration of implementation, ensuring benefits exceeded costs and measuring all unforeseen consequences, and then must go back through the full promulgation process, including notice and comment and consulting stakeholders.
Conclusion
Cicero’s wisdom is useful to American policymakers today. While leaders are often motivated to champion novel policies that feel exciting, sometimes the boldest path forward is winning old fights by undoing old laws that undermine freedom and human flourishing.