“Every great reform which has been effected has consisted not in doing something new, but in undoing something old. The most valuable additions made to legislation have been enactments destructive of preceding legislation; and the best laws passed, have been those by which some former laws were repealed.”
Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England (1872)*
Henry Thomas Buckle could be remembered as Henry Thomas Unbuckle, since he was a nineteenth-century liberal who most admired government when it was abolishing itself. Buckle believed that the best laws repealed old laws, that the most constructive political policy was destruction of old political policies. Buckle did not carry his doctrine to absolute anarchism and the abolition of government, but he believed that government was pernicious when it attempted to do anything more than “maintain order,” “prevent the strong from oppressing the weak,” and “adopt certain precautions respecting the public health.”**
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Calculus of Decay 