Ask the 535 members of the U.S. Congress to list the first three attributes of God that come to their minds, and I’ll guarantee you one that they’ll almost certainly leave off: His creativity.

A federal judge in Texas has nullified a U.S. Department of Labor rule that would have granted automatic overtime pay to an additional 4 million U.S. workers, a key regulatory priority for former President Barack Obama. U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant ruled Thursday the Labor Department exceeded its authority to automatically grant time-and-a-half pay for salaried workers earning less than $47,476 per year. Mazzant said the rule wrongly focused too heavily on hours worked instead of job duties. The Obama administration hailed the rule as a way to boost wage stagnation.

Timothy Sandefur begins The Permission Society—a runner-up for WORLD’s 2016 Book of the Year in the Understanding the World category—with this sentence: “Not having to ask for permission is one of the most essential parts of freedom.” His last chapter begins: “The basic principle of the Permission Society is that freedom is a privilege the government may give or take away as it sees fit.” In between, Sandefur shows how the United States has morphed from its founding ideal of inalienable rights to an oppo