Akira Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai takes place in medieval Japan, during a period of prolonged civil war that has left the countryside plagued by bandits. Sick and tired of having their rice harvest stolen yet again, a group of enterprising farmers do the unthinkable: they pool what little resources they have and hire a band of seven masterless samurai warriors to defend the village and — eventually — take the fight to the bandits themselves.The film builds slowly, but the pay-off is absolutely first-rate and has spawned a million imitators, most famously, the American remake The Magnificent Seven (which is, itself, being remade… and not for the first time, either). I don’t want to oversell it, but even Troy Senik might enjoy it.

In his upcoming book, By The People, Charles Murray proposes that American business owners take a similar approach regarding the federal regulatory state. As he describes his plan in a recent speech at the Cato Institute:

To put it bluntly, what I want to do is to make large chunks of the federal code of regulations unenforceable. I want to make government into an insurable hazard not unlike the insurance against flood, and fire, or swarms of locusts. The way I want to do it is through massive civil disobedience underwritten by privately-funded defense funds.

The genesis of the idea was Murray’s realization that regulatory law — almost by its very nature — comes down hardest on those playing by the rules while leaving the worst actors alone. For example, a friend of his who hires a lot of legal foreign workers finds himself the target of immeasurable scrutiny because he documents his employees’ immigration statuses so scrupulously; the paper trail he creates in doing so invites regulatory scrutiny, while his shady competitors get away with hiring illegals largely because they’re less fastidious.

The problem is that regulators have — relatively speaking — a bottomless hole of resources to draw on, should a citizen try to fight an issue in court. Even if the facts and law are against the government, they can spin the thing out long enough to make a lawsuit prohibitively expensive for the person they’re investigating, all but forcing him to pay the fine or otherwise surrender.

Under Murray’s proposal, however, this is precisely the moment when “a man in a pin-striped suit” would appear on behalf of the business owner and inform the government that it is his client who possesses the greater legal resources and patience, courtesy of a private fund set-up in advance, either by a public advocacy group or his trade or professional association. Indeed, it is now the regulatory agency who finds itself asking whether the case is really worth its while. Essentially the idea is to spawn a thousand Institutes for Justice, and Murray claims to have some big donors lined-up to help fund such projects.

It would be one thing — and a pretty bold one at that — if Murray proposed that these funds protect citizens who are innocent of any crime, but Murray wants to go further: we’ll have to wait for his book to come out next month for the full details, but he advocates that these funds also vigorously clients whom they know to be guilty of particularly odious and/or unnecessary regulations. This, Murray suggests, will have the effect of making these regulations unenforceable by making them prohibitively expensive and difficult to prosecute.

I’m very curious to see the details, but I’m very jazzed by the idea. It may be unpleasant to analogize freeborn Americans citizens with medieval Japanese peasants, but — if, indeed, it’s an accurate comparison — I rather like the idea of our hiring some ronin.