The Federal Register is a daily publication by the federal government which outlines notices, executive orders of the President, and proposed and final rules promulgated by regulatory agencies. The more the federal government regulates, the more pages go into the Federal Register.

Credit - Evan Bench

In 2011 over 81,000 new pages were added to the Federal Register.

That staggering number needs context. When you look at an average page in the Federal Register, it contains a huge amount of text, generally around 1,000 words. To ensure we aren’t over estimating, let’s assume approximately 900 words per page. That means that at 900 words per page, the 81,000 pages added to the Federal Register last year alone would total nearly 73,000,000 words.  Just how many words is that? As an example, take a look at the list of classic books below, and try to guess how many words are in these books combined:

• Atlas Shrugged
• War and Peace
• The Lord of the Rings Series
• The Harry Potter Series
• The Bible
• Pride and Prejudice
• Gone with the Wind
• The Fountainhead
• East of Eden
• Moby Dick
• Jane Eyre
• Little Women
• Great Expectations
•  The Grapes of Wrath
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• Oliver Twist
• Emma
•  Last of the Mohicans
• 20000 Leagues Under the Sea
• A Tale of Two Cities
• Schindler’s List
• Life on the Mississippi
• Sense and Sensibility
• Walden
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Wuthering Heights
• Gulliver’s Travels
•  To Kill a Mockingbird
• Anne of Green Gables
• 1984
• The Diary of Anne Frank
• The English Patient
• The Secret Garden
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• The Catcher in the Rye
• White Fang
• Brave New World
• The Scarlet Letter
• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Lord of the Flies
• The Wind in the Willows
• The Great Gatsby
• Crime and Punishment

All of these classics together add up to approximately 7.3 million words. That means you’d have to read every single one of these books ten times over to achieve the same word count that was added to the Federal Register in a single year.

That’s over-regulation.