Wednesday, January 26, 2011

It is broke, so let's fix it

You like living with 100 laws.

It is the nature of government to empower itself. Government gets bigger and the laws it passes are more and more encompassing and invasive. Wouldn't it be great if someone ran on a platform that for every law s/he passed, s/he'd repeal two? Then imagine this thought experiment: that this repeal continued until society had just 100 laws, each detailed on a single page in a book every citizen carried on his person. Everyone knew the law, and every time a politician wanted to pass a new law, s/he'd have to argue why it should replace an existing law. And we'll end the book with a one-page list of ten rights every citizen has as a basis for which to determine when the necessarily generalized stipulations of these one-page laws have actually been broken.

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