Complex Societies Need Simple Laws

"If you have 10,000 regulations," Winston Churchill said, "you destroy all respect for law."

He was right. But Churchill never imagined a government that would add 10,000 year after year. That's what we have in America. We have 160,000 pages of rules from the feds alone. States and localities have probably doubled that. We have so many rules that legal specialists can't keep up. Criminal lawyers call the rules "incomprehensible." They are. They are also "uncountable." Congress has created so many criminal offenses that the American Bar Association says it would be futile to even attempt to estimate the total.

America is a country that runs on the rule of law. However, if there are so many laws that we can break them because we don't even know they exist, what kind of society is that?

How about when rules and laws actually lead to death?

Consider what happened in Britain, a country even more rule-bound than America. A man had an epileptic seizure and fell into a shallow pond. Rescue workers might have saved him, but they wouldn't enter the 3-foot-deep pond. Why? Because "safety" rules passed after rescuers drowned in a river now prohibited "emergency workers" from entering water above their ankles. Only 30 minutes later, when rescue workers with "stage 2 training" arrived, did they enter the water, discover that the man was dead and carry him to the approved inflatable medical tent. Twenty other cops, firemen and "rescuers" stood next to the pond and watched.

I can see the above happening in America. I'm surprised it hasn't already. Law is good, but when law becomes chaos, it's past time to rework things.

/TOA

Do you have links to what you are quoting from?

This year alone will see 40,000 NEW laws added to the books all across our nation. Pile on top of pile on top of pile. What we have now is just a giant Compost heap of legislation and redundancy. The lawyers love it! Go figure, the majority of our legislators also happen to be lawyers.

www.msnbc.msn.com...

Originally posted by Toromos
Do you have links to what you are quoting from?

Gah! I can't believe I did that!

Complex Societies Need Simple Laws

/TOA