A barbarous solution to the barbarous problem of over-legislation:
A Locrian who proposed any new law stood forth in the assembly of the people with a cord round his neck, and, if the law was rejected, the innovator was instantly strangled.
-Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, p. 1435.
I personally prefer peaceful solutions that reform the institutional rules that make over-legislating and over-regulation possible in the first place. But before the days of Douglass North and James Buchanan, this was apparently what people had to work with.
Inertia Wins! 