TheAgitator.com
Too Many Laws
Wednesday, March 10th, 2004That’s the gist of my new Fox column.
Go now, and read it.
15 Responses to “Too Many Laws”
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“If we merely required every congressman to actually understand a new law before voting for it, that would be a pretty good start.”
Lobby for a law requiring it.
While I still think you’re crazy when you mention that you consider voting Democrat, I have to say that was an excellent article. Great job.
Good article. Although it’s the “Federal Register”, not the “Federal Registry”. The latter may be something involving sex offenders and/or wedding china.
I read your column after finishing a 17-page comment letter to the FTC opposing their latest antitrust “settlement” with a physician group out in California. The case actually demonstrates the theme of your column. The FTC Act, passed by Congress, bans “unfair competition” without defining the term. Thus the FTC decides what’s fair and what isn’t. In this case, the FTC has a rule that says independent physicians may not band together and jointly negotiate contracts with health insurers. The reason for the policy is simple: Physicians actually negotiate, rather than accept the insurer’s offer, which is usually tied to the below-market Medicare rates. It’s basically a soft price control.
Anyhow, the FTC says the docs can’t negotiate unless they achieve “significant risk sharing or clinical integration”. The problem is, the settlement never defines “significant”. After 10 years, the FTC has never defined “significant”. It’s never had to. Every case they’ve brought under this physician rule has been settled without a hearing. If you ask an experienced healthcare antitrust lawyer what a physician group has to do to comply with the rule, he couldn’t tell you. I know. I’ve asked several. It’s like watching an episode of “Star Trek” involving time travel.
Right on! We’re so used to our convoluted quagmire of laws that we forget it could be any different. We also need a simple “handbook” in which citizens can learn about basic laws. Any system more complicated than we use for traffic laws is too complicated. People are educated on traffic laws before getting a driver’s license, so there should be a similar education system available to citizens for general state and federal regulations. Once people start seeing the laws, there could be two beneficial side effects:
* it sparks a debate on change and simplification
* it serves as a deterrent to those who take violation lightly (some case studies ought to help)
Thanks!
http://www.stopfcc.com/message.php
go ahead and sign it…who knows, it may make a difference
There should be a law against laws or something.
There oughta’ be a law that requires for every new law passed, three old ones have to be erased. How long would that last before we ran out of laws? When you think of how many decisions the US Supreme court has produced defining the meaning of just one law it appears that we’re talking eternity.
One of the more interesting things about the later Roman Empire was the sheer weight of the books containing its laws. Check out the Justinian Code sometime if you want to see what the simplified version looked like. The word Byzantine is used as a synonym for complex with good reason.
YOU GOTTA PAY TO PLAY.
It’s really very simple. Lawyers and lawmakers don’t look for new laws to make. People force them to by doing things that they know they shouldn’t do. Be it beause “there’s no law against it” or they feel they’re more important than everyone else. Who knows how many reasons/excuses people might have but it happens all the time. Take the Super Bowl half time show. How many laws is that going to create, and at what expense. How about cell phones in movie theaters or the morons who sue others because they spilled a hot cup of coffee on their own crotch or shoved a double cheese burger in their own mouth. At the risk of sounding like a crusty old grade school teacher; if people would just behave, these new laws would stop piling up. If that’s too much to ask, at least realize that if we can’t regulate our selves, we get to pay billions every year for “high paid” attorneys and lawmakers to baby-sit us.
At 76 I have been accused of being cynical for 25 years in my complaint about Federal Agency Bureaucrats self-serving interpretation of the Federal Register, micro-management, arrogance and incompetence. At least guys like you and Fox News are talking about it now, so there is hope after all although perhaps not in my lifetime.
This is what happens when you have full time, professional politicians. When politicians worked only while in session and the rest of the time in their own business, they had less time to pass mundane laws.
Many of the laws I deal with are out of date by the time they are passed and written in the Federal Register.
Too Many Laws Due To Too Many Mystics
Radley Balko who writes The Agitator has written an article for FoxNews.com, America Mired in Morass of Laws and Regulations. He does a good job of illustrating just how ridiculous and irrational our legal system has become, yet never addresses
Jim M.
You’ve got me by 2yrs, but I’m planning on waiting around till something does really change. I would like to see a trash fire made up of all the laws and regulation passed in the past 20 years declared null and void and burned quickly before someone could change their mind or equate it with book burning in Germany.
I liked what I read on Foxnews.com
Applause!
I posted a link to your piece on FreeSpeech.com
Thank you and keep up the good work,
Steven G. Erickson
Being as I am working towards a PhD in Computer Science, I hold some hope that computers are getting better and better at “reading” our natural language. There has been considerable interest in Natural Language Processing or NLP as it is called these days and it has been getting steadily better.
Computational power has grown at a steady exponential pace for the past 40 years, and today we are starting to put that computational power to work on those hard problems such as understanding the inherently ambiguous and poorly structured medium that human language is.
I hold a sneaking hope that computers will become massively used in government to vastly streamline laws and the enforcement of laws. I envision computers becoming useful in processing the law, breaking it down, indexing it, querying it, and functioning as superfast, massively energetic (but not particular creative) legal assistants that can expose redundancy, inaccuracy, contradiction, and waste in laws.
I have high confidence that at least 75% of most regulations can be collapsed together, trimmed, shrunk, or eliminated. I have medium confidence that this can happen for 85% of regulations, and low confidence but high hope that it can be done for 95% of regulations.