The late Murray Rothbard, a UNLV economist of national repute, used to tell a story about his mentor, the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises.

Sensing he would not fare well in greater Germany during the Nazi era, von Mises migrated to New York, where he would meet socially with a group of young American student economists. As English was not his first language, some of the American idioms left von Mises puzzled. At one point he interrupted to ask “ ‘Loophole,’ what is this word you keep using, ‘loophole’?”

Once this term of art for analyzing the American system of taxation and regulation was explained, von Mises summarized, “Ah, so a ‘loophole’ is when they have left something unregulated.”

“A new loophole in election spending regulations is likely to produce a torrent of unsolicited e-mails to voters,” warned Jeffrey Birnbaum in The Washington Post this week.

Purveyors of private e-mail addresses and designers of campaign Web sites report that business is booming this year “as partisans take advantage of an exemption in election rules that allows wealthy individuals to pour unlimited sums into Internet communications without having to disclose their identities or total expenditures,” the Post reports.

The loophole is “potentially breathtaking,” said Roger Alan Stone of Advocacy Inc., an e-mail address retailer.

“It provides an enormous opportunity for political campaigns,” Max Fose of Integrated Web Strategy, which also sells e-mail addresses to political campaigns, told the Post. “Both men are expanding their staffs in anticipation of what they expect to be a multimillion-dollar surge in unregulated campaign spending via the Internet.”

“Unregulated”? Oh, the humanity!

“The e-mail exemption, which was approved by the Federal Election Commission in March, might become the next big avenue for campaign funding abuses, some experts warn,” quoth Mr. Birnbaum, using the tried and true journalistic technique for voicing thoughts which cannot be attributed to any single source other than, perhaps ... the writer.

The source of all these concerns about “abuse”? The FEC voted unanimously on March 26 not to regulate political communication on the Internet, including e-mails, blogs and the creation of Web sites. The commission had decided two years earlier to exempt all Internet activity from regulation, but that ruling was overturned by a federal judge who ordered the FEC to write rules that apply to at least some parts of cyberspace.

Do judges make our laws, now? And while “campaign finance restrictions” are already having a chilling effect on freedom of expression around the country, can we begin to see a pattern here?

Like little Dutch boys shrieking as they rush about to stick their fingers in one dike after another, the forces of “campaign finance reform” are outraged that citizens keep finding new ways to spend their own money making political statements in favor of -- or opposed to -- one or another candidate or issue.

In the past, the British government taxed newspaper by the page. Publishers invented the “broadsheet,” reducing their tax load by putting the same amount of news on fewer, but larger, pages. The British government, hoping to raise revenue while also reducing drunkenness among the laboring classes, taxed beer. The lower classes switched to gin -- gosh, there was an improvement.

Were all these people disobeying the law? No. They were altering their behavior to accomplish their goals while obeying an increasingly absurd chain of enactments intended to alter the natural and predictable behavior of people acting in their own best interests.

Where in the Constitution does government find the right or power to stop a person -- even “the rich” -- from backing a candidate willing to vote their views at the capital? Nowhere.

Yet they keep trying. And those who believe they will be further crippled by excessive government taxes and regulation unless they “hire” a lawmaker who will listen to their views, will continue to find “loopholes.”

The solution is to rein government back within constitutional bounds, giving regulators and tax men no power to punish or manipulate the behavior of honest persons or businesses. Such newly “deregulated” citizens would then find far less need to pour millions into the political fray in hopes of protecting themselves.

Until that is done, watch for continued moaning and hand-wringing about -- and demands for ever new and more complex regulations aimed at -- newly discovered “loopholes” that still allow “the rich” to spend their own money expressing their political views as they please.