Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Monday, October 11. 2010

Drowing in rules and laws

"Hardly any social interaction is free of legal risk." Philip Howard in his Daily News piece, Drowning in Law: A flood of statutes, rules and regulations is killing the American spirit. A quote:


What's required to revive America is major structural overhaul. This is a task of historic proportions - not unlike the simplification of law by Justinian in ancient Rome. Our founding fathers never imagined that democracy would become a one-way ratchet - always adding laws but never repealing them. Nor did they intend law to be a form of central planning. The Constitution sets forth our governing goals and principles in only 16 pages.


Clayton Cramer went back to Federalist 62. One quote from James Madison:


It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?


Posted by The Barrister in Politics at 14:26 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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No problem atall.

Incorporate; LLC.
#1 Leag on 2010-10-11 14:31 (Reply)
Thanks for the link to Clayton Cramer's blog. He pulled his old one down because of a stupid lawsuit (that from scanning his new blog is now settled) and I've missed his insights. I recommend his blog to all Maggie's Farmers!
#2 mudbug on 2010-10-11 15:36 (Reply)
We think it's a bug. The politicians and 'crats consider it a feature.
#3 NJSoldier on 2010-10-11 15:58 (Reply)
We've seen the ratchet analogy: every step in government intervention, once in place, is locked by a ratchet. The next movement can only be forward, to go by history since the Hoover Administration. In the case of individual rights, that's a good thing. We'd all be horrified if the ratchet released and women lost the vote, or Asians were declared non-citizens.
But in terms of control, we need to reverse the ratchet. Environmental regulation, employment law, government intervention in general need to be rolled back a long way in order to release the talents of Americans to produce value.
#4 Geoff Brown on 2010-10-12 10:00 (Reply)

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