There is always a market for great musicians, brilliantly daring athletes, and exceptionally eloquent doomsayers. All provide entertainment, thereby fulfilling one of H. L. Mencken's three basic requirements for mankind's happiness.' Aside from this, the heralds of doom offer two special bonuses: instruction, however indirectly delivered, and titillation. Therefore, the public welcomes them with extraordinary enthusiasm, and the supply inevitably rises to meet the demand. Among the more popular today are those who assert that the world in general, and the United States in particular, is engulfed in a morass of government, fatally embraced by a manytentacled monster of waste and red tape. These visionaries are especially dangerous-by which I mean persuasive-because, like some of their colleagues in doom of yesteryear, their fanciful nightmares entrap a small but important kernel of truth. (For example, at the heart of Malthus' somber but erroneous premonitions was the valid law of diminishing returns.) In all such circumstances, what is critically essential for the public and other observers, when they begin to take the challenge seriously, is to separate the inner kernel from its outer trappings. Prominent in the outer trappings in the present instance is righteous dismay at the growth of government per se. On this supposed menace Murray Weidenbaum writes as movingly as any. He shows in documented detail that, at considerable cost, society is intervening with collective rules and regulations in virtually every sector of