In Neil Gorsuch’s latest book “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law,” the Supreme Court justice flags alarming imperfections in the proliferation of federal and state laws and ill-conceived enforcement that remind one of Mr. Bumble’s exasperation in Oliver Twist, “If the law supposes that, the law is a ass — a idiot.”

The justice overlooks, however, the frightening array of federal statutes or executive orders that empower the government to surveil “not-yet-guilty” citizens without warrants, to play prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner to kill Americans based on speculation that the target might become a national security threat, or to void international economic transactions. These laws that vastly expand government power to encroach on liberty include the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Executive Order 12333, the Insurrection Act, the National Emergencies Act, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Gorsuch, moreover, offers no cure for the disease of hundreds of thousands of inscrutable and economically deadweight laws or regulations that can be navigated only with $2,000-per-hour lawyers, favoring the rich over the poor.

The starting point for a cure is identifying the source of the proliferation, which Gorsuch astonishingly eschews. It is in plain view.

The United States was born with liberty as its glory. Among other things, liberty found expression in the right to be let alone enshrined in the Fourth Amendment and separation of powers, a structural bill of rights. Then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams elaborated in his July 4, 1821, address to Congress, “[America’s] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind.” Or as Henry David Thoreau put it, “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

The heartland of liberty is confining laws to deterring domestic predation, foreign aggression, government corruption or private tribal oppressions. Examples include prohibitions of treason, murder, assault, theft, burglary, arson, bribery, rape, slavery or unjust discrimination. James Madison, father of the Constitution, deplored the mutability and multiplicity of laws in the Federalist Papers because of the opportunities to enrich political insiders for speculating on public measures.

While liberty remained the nation’s North Star, laws, lawyers, litigation and law schools were few and far between. But there were warts. Slave codes. The Fugitive Slave Act. The exclusion of women from the professions and the franchise. The United States remained, nonetheless, a magnet for all who cherished liberty. Senator Henry Clay explained in thwarting embroilment by the United States in Russia’s 1849 invasion of Hungary, “Far better is it for ourselves, for Hungary, and for the cause of liberty, that … we should keep our lamp burning brightly on this western shore as a light to all nations, than to hazard its utter extinction amid the ruins of fallen or falling republics in Europe.”

But around the time of the Spanish-American War, after growing from an economic acorn into a giant oak, the United States struck a Faustian bargain. The temptation to raw power and world domination became irresistible and within reach. Liberty was jettisoned for a warfare-surveillance-welfare state seeking a risk-free existence. Fleas were magnified into elephants to justify wars or interventions in Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Panama, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Mexico, and World War I. Federal laws grew like bamboo. The Income Tax Amendment; the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Federal Reserve Act, the Selective Service Act, the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, and a vast array of economic wage and price controls or nationalizations. The FBI was established and headed by J. Edgar Hoover. And separation of powers was replaced by Caesars in the White House.

By 1940, Attorney General Robert Jackson flagged the proliferation of federal laws that invited abuses of prosecutorial discretion. Anticipating Justice Gorsuch by 84 years, the attorney general elaborated:

“If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm — in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies.”

The United States Supreme Court has aggravated the overreach of laws by cloaking prosecutors with absolute immunity for constitutional violations and endowing them with the power to bludgeon defendants into guilty pleas by threatening an escalation of charges if a trial is demanded.

The human toll of too much law began when the American Empire replaced the Republic and power displaced liberty as the nation’s loadstar. Until that is reversed, the human toll will continue.

Bruce Fein (X: @brucefeinesq; www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com) was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.”