Dear Friends,
It seems to me that writing legislation is like building a house.
Most legislation is never pointed at any particular thing. Take the drug policies of most nations. They are targeted at some nebulous idea of eradicating drug use. But they never actually look at what they really want to get and what compromises they are willing to make to get it.
If we further narrow down what we seek, as a goal, in the drug policies of a given nation, we might say, we want to keep our children off drugs. So we should give that priority over a shotgun approach. To lay out legislation without thinking in this way is like building a house without plans.
We show up at the job with a backhoe on site. Never laying out a line we guesstimate the sides and corners eventually joining the excavation. The cement truck pulls in and pours the footings filling the whole excavation using much more concrete than is necessary. Then we have lumber delivered and start framing. Unfortunately the footings are not square. So we have to make up for it in the framing of the walls. Then we close in the house with a roof. We don’t bother measuring the width of the roof so we order the wrong length trusses. What the hell we say they are long enough to reach the end of the wall… with no overhang. So we spike them in.
When we are done with our new house we find there are a few problems. Rain water sheets down the exterior walls getting in the poorly caulked windows. The rooms are either way too big or way too small for the use they are supposed to be put to and we find the our furniture doesn’t fit into the un-square corners. It is clear that building a house without plans or forethought is not a good idea. The outcome will fall far short of what is necessary.
So why is legislation different? No plan as to what is really wanted so no real thought can be given to the incentives that would actually result in the wanted outcome in real society. Is like our legislators randomly digging the footers for our new house.
Political patronage will keep the legislators from measuring anything very closely…After all it’s government money and is an endless font. More wording (concrete) is used than is needed. The walls are not exactly plumb perhaps because there is no scale for measuring legislation.
One of the Great Sages of Human history, Confucius I think, said; let a principality be governed by human hearted principles [leaders leading by example and actually following their own laws], and people will flock there from all lands. He was speaking ironically, because he knew that no such principality existed and would be many centuries away if it was even possible.
The illuminati who bestow our law don’t feel they should have to actually follow it. This makes them crooked. How can someone crooked lay out a plumb wall? They also have to make up for unintended consequences of pouring footers that are not square. The constitutionality is not square, because the footers were poorly built, but that cannot be helped, the right people on the Supreme Court will fix that. The roof is, the Executive branch, tasked with enforcing Law. Being only as sound as the Elite that run that branch. There will be some leaks. Like the SEC looking at Face book and porn instead for doing their job and watching the markets during the banking meltdown. Well actually, that was more of a gaping hole in the roof letting in a torrent not a trickle…
We find that the legislation doesn’t cover as much as we had hoped. The new law being barely utile despite much more materials going into it than was necessary. Not much is really covered by our new legislation but it will take lawyers thousands of man hours to figure that out. How do you suppose this legislation will hold up in an economic earthquake?
Costs go up and utility goes down, even as more legislation is needed to address the new problems in society, that crop up as a consequence of some pernicious incentive, from poorly thought out and worded legislation. Glomming on additions here and there to cover what was supposed to be covered by the original house, er legislation.
I wonder, if the legislators don’t even bother to read legislation they are enacting, maybe it’s because they won’t have to live with it… We will.
Time for a Numa?
