This article is part of a series focusing on Lens of Liberty, a project of the Vernon K. Krieble Foundation. In her Liberty Minute titled “Flocks of Sheep,” Helen Krieble quotes a passage from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America that is just as pertinent today as it was when it was published in 1835: A hundred and seventy-five years ago, Tocqueville warned Americans about a new kind of oppression from our own government. He said: The government covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic