Do you think people today have less respect for the law? If so, why?

Because there's no longer any possibility of finding out what the law is.

I'll give you a specific example that I know something about. We have a wonderful law: it's called Truth in Lending. The title suggests that prior to its passage, there wasn't any such thing. It has forty-three sections. We now have from the Federal Reserve Board six thousand pages of regulations. There are currently in the courts of the United States ten thousand lawsuits based on those.

It happens that on a Master Charge monthly billing in the State of New York, there are seven statutes that apply, apart from Truth in Lending. One law delineates the size of the numerals in the amount, but not the size of the type in the text. Another delineates the size of the text, and says below a certain type size the contract is not enforceable in court. Another delineates what goes on the front of the bill and what's on the back.

We spend thirty million bucks a year in auditing fees, sixteen million dollars a year in legal fees, and it's a possibility that we may be in conformity with every law. But only a possibility. You don't have ten thousand lawsuits if everyone agrees on what you should do.

Ninety percent of the banks in the United States have fewer than fifty employees. They haven't read those six thousand pages. There's no way they can read those six thousand pages.

So we have a two-tier society. We have the large corporations, which try like hell to obey confusing laws, and we have a whole sector of society that pays no attention to the law for the simple reason that they cannot. If I go down on First Avenue in New York and go into the neighborhood delicatessen and I say, "Hey, don't you know that OSHA requires that aisles be 37 inches wide?" The guy says, "Osha, gosha, get lost'.."

What concerns me is that a poor man learns that he's broken the law from a nightstick across his head. And the big guy learns about it from a headline in the paper, "X Corporation Violates Law."

There's no question that laws are being violated. The only question is which ones. If we have constructed a society that can't be law-abiding even when it wants to, I think we're in deep trouble in this country.

I'll give you a couple of numbers to illustrate. In the last session of Congress, twenty thousand bills were introduced. Twenty thousand bills'. That's one for each legislative staff member, by an odd coincidence. In one day, two hundred and seventy-two subcommittees of the Congress held hearings. Think about it. At the end of the day, the President of the United States signed eight hundred forty-three laws. That's just federal. Every day the Federal Register grows by three hundred thousand words, each one of which is amending or putting out a new regulation. Who in this room could read three hundred thousand words a day? I don't know how long is, but it can't be much more than that. In my own state of New York there were twenty thousand bills introduced last year. Citibank tracked fifteen hundred of them. The last New York State Legislature passed two thousand bills--two thousand in just one state. The Governor signed eighteen hundred.

Now, it's very simple to say, "You broke the law." There's no one yet who has ever read those eighteen hundred laws, including the guys who passed them.

So, what I'm suggesting is that we can't continue trying to legislate everything, or we'll have a total breakdown in our volunteer society, which is based on respect for the law.