Editor’s note: The following remarks were delivered at The New Criterion’s gala on April 29, 2015 honoring Charles Murray with the third Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society.

I am a little wary about receiving an award named for Edmund Burke two weeks before the publication of a book in which I advocate massive, systematic civil disobedience. I am not at all sure that Mr. Burke would approve. So let me try to placate Mr. Burke’s shade by talking for a few minutes about the roots of the book called By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission.

The operational plan I propose in the book is reasonably straightforward. The reasons that I think we are driven to that plan speak to some complex realities facing the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

First, the operational plan: to make large portions of the Federal Code of Regulations unenforceable. I want to make government into an insurable hazard, like flood, fire, or locusts. The way I want to do it is through massive civil disobedience underwritten by privately funded defense funds. Perhaps the best way to illustrate it is by telling you how I was inspired to write the book in the first place.

My wife knows a man in a town near us that I will call Bob. Bob operates one of the many kinds of businesses that use Latino workers. What makes Bob different