Political aside.
I know we're all wrapped up in the current events of the giant bailout and the election and all that stuff, but it keeps reminding me of something I've been thinking for a long time and haven't gotten around to sharing.
There are too many laws.
Not just a few too many. There are probably 100 times as many laws as we actually need to maintain a decent country.
I'm not advocating anarchy, I think we need laws. I think we need a lot of laws, in fact. But do you have any idea how many laws we actually have? More than "a lot".
We have so many laws, there's no way to understand them all at once. People often think that lawyers have power over other people because laws are written in a special jargon, and that's partially true, but a bigger problem is that there are too damn many.
It's made worse by all the binding "legal precedent" where most judges tend to listen to what other judges ruled in the past instead of bothering to make their own ruling. There are good reasons for doing it that way, but this is basically a parallel issue.
This week, I've seen a lot of buzz about the hundreds of pages added to the "bailout bill". Some of those provisions are actually repealing laws. Many of them are partial repeals, which just makes those laws more complicated. Are all of our congressmen really taking the time to read and comprehend every page of this convoluted monster? Do they do that with everything they vote on? Do they even know what the hell their doing up there?
I'm reminded about this every year at tax time. Sure, I like getting some tax breaks. But at some point there are so many back and forth that it's spawned a gigantic secondary market in people whose sole job it is to fill out tax forms. Is there really not something more productive we could have those people doing? They're not actually contributing to the economy, they're not actually getting things done that would need to be done, except that the tax system is too complicated.
Even if every law on the books was just and fair and a slight refinement for the greater good, the fact that there are so many of them creates an insurmountable injustice, because there's no way to understand what the laws actually are. An individual law that is incomprehensible is inherently unjust. Taken together, the sheer volume of all laws is too great to be comprehensible, and laws in general become unjust.
And it's only getting worse. Like a shelf that is never dusted, our legal code accumulates more detritus with every passing year. The constitution is over 200 years old, and is still a pretty nice document, but more and more junk is weighing down on it all the time. It's much more common to create a new law than to repeal an old one, and all that stuff is still on the books.
I have an idea for a solution, but I need to get to work, maybe I'll have time to post that later today or next week.
There are too many laws.
Not just a few too many. There are probably 100 times as many laws as we actually need to maintain a decent country.
I'm not advocating anarchy, I think we need laws. I think we need a lot of laws, in fact. But do you have any idea how many laws we actually have? More than "a lot".
We have so many laws, there's no way to understand them all at once. People often think that lawyers have power over other people because laws are written in a special jargon, and that's partially true, but a bigger problem is that there are too damn many.
It's made worse by all the binding "legal precedent" where most judges tend to listen to what other judges ruled in the past instead of bothering to make their own ruling. There are good reasons for doing it that way, but this is basically a parallel issue.
This week, I've seen a lot of buzz about the hundreds of pages added to the "bailout bill". Some of those provisions are actually repealing laws. Many of them are partial repeals, which just makes those laws more complicated. Are all of our congressmen really taking the time to read and comprehend every page of this convoluted monster? Do they do that with everything they vote on? Do they even know what the hell their doing up there?
I'm reminded about this every year at tax time. Sure, I like getting some tax breaks. But at some point there are so many back and forth that it's spawned a gigantic secondary market in people whose sole job it is to fill out tax forms. Is there really not something more productive we could have those people doing? They're not actually contributing to the economy, they're not actually getting things done that would need to be done, except that the tax system is too complicated.
Even if every law on the books was just and fair and a slight refinement for the greater good, the fact that there are so many of them creates an insurmountable injustice, because there's no way to understand what the laws actually are. An individual law that is incomprehensible is inherently unjust. Taken together, the sheer volume of all laws is too great to be comprehensible, and laws in general become unjust.
And it's only getting worse. Like a shelf that is never dusted, our legal code accumulates more detritus with every passing year. The constitution is over 200 years old, and is still a pretty nice document, but more and more junk is weighing down on it all the time. It's much more common to create a new law than to repeal an old one, and all that stuff is still on the books.
I have an idea for a solution, but I need to get to work, maybe I'll have time to post that later today or next week.