The 10 Million Commandments

The Federal Government is not God

I did a blog post on The Ten Commandments awhile back, and diving into a Jewish website on the subject, I learned that God gave us way more than just 10 commandments.

The Lord Almighty can give us all the commandments He sees fit; they are for our benefit.  The Feral Government, on the other hand, needs to knock it off.  We have too many laws, they are too wordy, and they are strangling us and choking off the kind of innovation that drives economic growth.

Such a hopeless tangle of impenetrable legal sludge makes a mockery of the very idea of law.  Such laws, that ordinary citizens cannot be expected to understand, leading them to routinely violate the law, do great damage to the Rule of Law. 

The current convention of law-as-instruction-manual suffers the idiocies of central planning, forcing everyone to go through the day with their noses in rule books instead of using their common sense. It also spawns such complexity that overhauling the vast accumulation of law would be hopeless - like trying to prune a jungle.  (Phillip K. Howard)

 Howard offers a solution:  Radical Simplification...

There is one common technique that has been used in successful legal overhauls, from Justinian's recodification in ancient times to the Napoleonic code that is the basis of modern European civil law to the uniform commercial code adopted in the United States in the 1950s. The technique is this: radical simplification.

Simplification of law has many virtues. It allows legislatures to pass measures of a general nature, setting goals and operating principles without trying to anticipate every regulatory situation. Think of the Constitution or the straightforward recommendations of the deficit commission. 

It will be interesting to see if the GOP can turn back this tide of legislative insanity that now washes over every last corner of our lives.  Those who decry a lack of bipartisanship need look no further than the burgeoning federal code, produced by statists in the Republican as well as Democratic party in equal measure.

WaPo - One Nation Under Too Many Laws

We're All Criminals Now

In a nation of hammers, every problem looks like a nail...

In a government ruled by lawyers, every citizen looks like a criminal, and every problem can be solved by one more law...

Gene Healy at CATO writes about a case before the supreme court arguing a law "criminalizing schemes to "deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.""

Yes, it's as ridiculous as it sounds.  Justice Breyer observed, to the government lawyer defending the broad criminal statute...

"Of some 150 million workers in the United States, I think possibly 140 million of them would flunk your test."

Healy points out that the founders would in no way approve of the dense tangle of criminal law our busy barristers have spun out over these many years:

It's for good reason that our Constitution mentions only three federal crimes (treason, piracy, and counterfeiting).

At one point on Tuesday, Breyer protested: "I thought there was a principle that a citizen is supposed to be able to understand the criminal law."
Good luck with that.

More Laws Than We Can Count

There are now more than 4,000 federal crimes, spread out through some 27,000 pages of the U.S. Code.

Some years ago, analysts at the Congressional Research Service tried to count the number of separate offenses on the books, and gave up, lacking the resources to get the job done.

If teams of legal researchers can't make sense of the federal criminal code, obviously, ordinary citizens don't stand a chance.

You can serve federal time for [...] misappropriating the likeness of Woodsy Owl and his associated slogan, "Give a hoot, don't pollute." ("What are you in for, kid?" your new cellmate growls.)

... And every week Ray Lahood or some other liberal Obama apparatchik marches out and announces another new writ from the emperor.  Does it make you feel safer knowing that if you unwittingly break one of these laws you could go to jail?