Laws have gotten far too detailed:
Until recent decades, law based on principles was the structure of most public law. The Constitution is 10 pages long and provides basic precepts—say, the Fourth Amendment prohibition on “unreasonable searches and seizures”—without trying to define every situation. The recent Volcker Rule regulating proprietary trading, by contrast, is 950 pages, and, in the words of one banker, is “incoherent any way you look at it.”
Legal principles have the supreme virtue of activating individual responsibility. Law is still supreme. The goals of law are centralized, but implementation is decentralized. Every successful regulatory program works this way. New airplanes, for example, must be certified as “airworthy” by the FAA. There are no detailed regulations that set forth how many rivets per square foot are required. It’s up to the judgment of FAA officials. This system works pretty well. Which would you trust more, a plane approved by experts at the FAA or a plane that was allowed to fly merely because it satisfied a bunch of rules, many outdated?
The health-care law exemplifies this problem.
The problem with doing it the right way is it requires people of honor and integrity. Doing it the wrong way doesn’t work, but that’s what you get when people have no honor.
Just canceled my health insurance today.
A heartfelt thanks to Jim and all the democrats and statist republicans.
“There are no detailed regulations that set forth how many rivets per square foot are required. It’s up to the judgment of FAA officials. This system works pretty well.”
But isn’t this the same system that gets people up in arms when it comes to other agencies? Appointed officials making statutory interpretations of laws written by other people, with no recourse for those aggrieved by those interpretive regulations?
See also: IRS, EPA, FAA-AST, etc.
“There are no detailed regulations that set forth how many rivets per square foot are required. It’s up to the judgment of FAA officials. This system works pretty well.”
There’s an old aviation saying that FAA regulations are written in blood because they’re usually the result of accidents. The FAA doesn’t mandate how many rivets per foot per se. Instead, they mandate load factors that engineers use to design planes. All composite planes and planes that use bonded surfaces don’t have many rivets but they still have to comply with the load limits. To me, that’s how regulations should be written – mandate the requirement but leave the techniques for compliance up to the engineers. This allows for the incorporation of new technologies. From an EPA perspective, a similar type of regulation would mandate automobile tailpipe emission standards without mandating a particular compliance technology. A simplier way of saying it is to define the compliance requirements (what must be done), not how to comply.
While your point is valid Larry, the first question should be do we need another rule?
More so, what rule do we have that we can eliminate?
Most things have many layers of redundancy along with contradiction.
Then you have the tyrannical aspect of selective enforcement which should cause immediate impeachment.
Equal justice is a laugh (or cry) these days with police grabbing assets just because they can.
Oh, there’s a definite need to thin out the set of rules. Some airline pilots will tell you that it’s impossible to make a flight without violating at least one FAR (federal aviation regulation) because some of them contradict others. For example, an aerobatic maneuvers are defined in Sec 91.303 as “an intentional maneuver involving an abrupt change in an aircraft’s attitude, an abnormal attitude, or abnormal acceleration, not necessary for normal flight.” Other clauses in that regulation specify prohibitions on aerobatic flight as well. However, many airports mandate that pilots fly noise abatement procedures that require abrupt changes in the aircraft’s attitude. The regulations conflict one another and if a pilot makes a mistake, he’ll be charged with violating the rules.
In a sane world conflicting rules is a defense in such cases.
Laws have gotten far too detailed
Earlier today I was thinking exactly that in regard to US libel and slander laws:
Who said it should be irrelevant to whether or not it’s libelous.
Who it was said about should be irrelevant to whether or not it’s libelous.
The only measure of whether or not an assertion is libelous should be whether or not it’s true. The details of Who said “xxxx” about who should, if the offending passage is ruled libelous (true or not), then be the determinant of the degree of restitution.
Prince or pauper, the law shouldn’t differentiate.
That would shear a zero or two of the legal bill.
But then all the men would get dragged into court for saying “I think she’s gained a little weight.”
I believe the standard for libel/slander is untrue, and in reckless or deliberate disregard for the truth.