Last week I met a man bound at the wrists and ankles with red tape.

He is a doctor with a successful practice who likes wine—enough that he decided a few years ago to turn his hobby into a side business and to open Oklahoma City’s one and only commercial vineyard.

By doing so, he walked straight into a blizzard: a disorienting, frustrating maelstrom of city, county and state bureaucracy. But it wasn’t random like weather. It was calculated—and it seemed directly aimed at shutting him down.

Last Sunday, as this man hosted a tasting of his various wines for my friends and me, he told his harrowing tale: his endless trips into the city to pacify officials; their continual demands that he make pricey renovations to meet various codes; the volcano of paperwork he had to repeatedly fill out with expensive expert help.

As he spoke, I was reminded of the recent stories of enterprising youths who, in time-honored American tradition, set up lemonade stands—only to be closed down and fined for lacking proper licenses and permits. Thus, instead of learning how to take initiative, provide a public service and manage responsibility, they learn to fear bureaucrats and to sit on their cans. This in the name of “protecting the safety of people,” who presumably don’t appreciate the risk of drinking a product concocted in the wilds of a domestic kitchen.

With unemployment over 9 percent and the economy stagnant, one can’t help but wonder how much this kind of senseless hyper-regulation is to blame. How many budding businesses are simply being suffocated by bureaucratic micromanagement? How many jobs are failing to materialize because of regulatory overreach? How much are America’s once legendary productive energies being sucked dry over mere nonsense?

The day a new businessman hires a single employee, he becomes subject to at least 10 federal regulations. That number swells as the business succeeds. To comply with such requirements, small businesses have to shell out $10,585 for every employee they hire, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. Regulations cost each American firm an average of $161,000—and that doesn’t count the costs it passes down to consumers. American manufacturers are hit worst: They pay an average of $688,944 per firm. If the government is trying to stifle economic growth, this is a superb way.

Companies generally may be hurting because of it, but one business is clearly booming: the manufacture of still more regulations. In his report “Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State,” Clyde Wayne Crews named 845 rules and regulations proposed just last year that are expected to affect small businesses. The year before had 758; the year before that, 753. Who can keep up? Someone opening a restaurant in New York City, for example, “may have to contend with as many as 11 city agencies, often with conflicting requirements; secure 30 permits, registrations, licenses and certificates; and pass 23 inspections,” the New York Times reveals. (That article, by the way, is about how the city tackled this problem by setting up yet another government agency to help restaurant owners navigate the bureaucratic swamp.)

While the rest of the economy is stuck or shrinking, government just grows and grows. As Mark Steyn brings out in his book After America, “In the ’50s, 1 in 20 members of the workforce needed government permission in order to do his job. Today, it’s one in three.” And it’s a self-feeding monster. Federal regulatory compliance cost an outrageous $1.13 trillion in 2005—nearly 10 percent of gdp. That doesn’t even count the cost of state and local red tape. Surely this money could be put to better use than rescuing unsuspecting consumers from unlicensed lemonade.

Supposedly all this fussy superintendence is aimed at keeping us safe. It is the ultramagnified version of the mommy who keeps her soft son “safe” at a video game console rather than risk letting him explore the dangerous woods. And the effect is the same. At one time the nation built great railroads and dams, won world wars, and sent men to the moon. But, as Prof. Bruce Charlton of the University of Buckingham in England wrote, around the 1970s “the human spirit began to be overwhelmed by bureaucracy.” “Now we have dull and docile committee members,” he wrote, “chosen partly with an eye to affirmative action and to generate positive media coverage, whose major priority is not to do the job but to avoid personal responsibility and prevent side-effects … all of whom are hemmed-about by regulations such that—whatever they do do, or do not do—they will be in breach of some rule or another.”

What have we done to ourselves? Where’s the common sense?

The shift of influence from visionary, ambitious leaders to today’s myopic kid-busting administrators parallels America’s loss of national power. While America busies itself with keeping everyone safe, the rest of the world screams past.

“In the decade after 9/11, China … built the Three Gorges Dam, the largest electricity-generating plant in the world,” Steyn wrote. “Dubai, a mere sub-jurisdiction of the United Arab Emirates, put up the world’s tallest building and built a Busby Berkeley geometric kaleidoscope of offshore artificial islands. Brazil, an emerging economic power, began diverting the São Francisco River to create some 400 miles of canals to irrigate its parched northeast.” These projects simply aren’t done in America anymore. Too much hassle.

China, after having virtually no live surveillance capability a decade ago, has since caught up with America. It has already put men in space, and India is shooting for 2016 to do so. Meanwhile, this summer marked the end of America’s space shuttle program and the beginning of its dependency on the Russians if it wants any Americans in space. (nasa’s new priority is to “reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering.”) Until 2008, the U.S. was the world’s most competitive economy, according to the World Economic Forum. A couple weeks ago it was announced America has slipped to fifth place, behind Switzerland, Singapore, Sweden and Finland.

Such headlines have become routine. They are unmistakable marks of a collapsing empire. Believe it or not, this shrinkage in superpower was prophesied to occur just before the end of this age. God warned of a time when sound judgment would be far from us, when we would grope and stumble in broad daylight like blind men (Isaiah 59:9-10). He told America—the descendants of ancient Israel—that because of our sins, He would remove the nation’s mighty, honorable, capable, wise, eloquent and grand-thinking leaders and allow selfish, small-minded children to take their places (Isaiah 3:1-4). This prophecy stands fulfilled.

We’ll soon see how “safe” we are in the long run.