The never ending accumulation of laws

 People treat the idea of abolishing entire government departments as incredibly radical but what's radical is having a system where laws accumulate endlessly forever with no plan to ever repeal them. The structure of legislative accumulation is baked into the Constitution and no thought to its inherent danger is ever given. What is your plan to enforce all these laws? How much taxes will be required to enforce them? If the number of laws grows forever will the taxes have to grow forever? How will the laws affect the ability of the economy to operate when the economy slows down to a molasses crawl? With so many laws on the books, and limited revenue for enforcement, these laws will obviously have to be selectively enforced. How will you combat the temptation to selectively enforce them in a politically motivated way against enemies? Will you need laws for that too? How does anything get done with an endlessly expanding set of rules?

Obviously the never ending accumulation of laws leads to a nation's ruin. To make matters worse, many of these laws are rent seeking provisions designed to enrich classes of people at the expense of everyone else. There is a law banning the imports of foreign drugs in order to raise their prices. There is another law that limits the number of primary care doctors in the United States. There are state laws that prohibit you from building your own house and require you to use a contractor, even if the house comes as a kit certified by architects. There are laws that require you to have a front yard of a minimum width. These are called setback laws. In most places you are not allowed to have a fence more than 8 ft tall in the back or 4 ft tall in the front, even if the local government turns your neighborhood into a high crime area. In Colorado it is illegal for there to be more than one architecture school in the entire state. It is illegal to take performance enhancing drugs like anabolic steroids even if you are not an athlete in order to protect the sports profession. You cannot exercise autonomy over your body because someone else's profits have to be guarded. You need a prescription for all kinds of things you shouldn't need a prescription for. It costs a billion dollars to get even the simplest medical device like a bandage approved, even if other bandages of the same type are already approved. It costs millions of dollars to crash test a vehicle and this makes it impossibly expensive to start a car company, even though car designs could be open source and each design already tested and proven. Taking a company public can cost a 100k in legal bills, defeating its purpose, which is to raise funds for new businesses. In California one in three worker compensation claims results in a lawsuit because lawyers have to get paid. "Sightline" regulations make it virtually impossible to build new electrical transmission lines and substations in certain places, guaranteeing future brownouts. Because of regulations forrests cannot be selectively burned, which results in worse wildfires because the underbrush accumulates. NEPA and other regulations make building high-speed rail almost impossible. It's illegal to sell a better gas can even though the one designed by experts is almost impossible to use without spilling. You have to run your dishwasher twice to get your dishes clean because of energy efficiency regulations. People deal with flicker, migraines, and eye strain because incandescent bulbs were outlawed in favor of LEDs. People don't sell hot food at the farmers market because each and every stall must go through a regulatory process instead of the market as a whole. You need a license to cut hair. Doctors cannot prescribe probiotics that reverse tooth decay because it is unprofitable for the supplement company to go through FDA approval. There are many other things that doctors don't prescribe for the same reason, including drugs that are superior to what is currently authorized. If you want an STD test you must submit yourself to invasive questioning, as mandated by law. 

It goes on and on and keep in mind that each and every one of these laws was recommended by experts. If you didn't need another reason to hate experts just remember that millions of low IQ idiots are tormented by a beeping smoke detector only because experts thought it was a good idea.

And these laws accumulate relentlessly without end. The Civil Rights Act puts a government commissar in every businesses HR department. Indeed, the main reason why you need a master's degree and 5 years experience to get an entry level job is because they are worried about being sued. It is illegal to just hire people on the basis of IQ so the college degree is the last verification of competence—but because the same race based hiring in the corporate world happens in university admissions, they require ever more and more certifications and degrees and experience because they are stuck between a lawsuit and a hard place. Hiring on the basis of competence has obvious and inescapable racial knock-on effects, is illegal, but is also essential for the proper functioning of any technological system, including a communist one.

Elon Musk got sued for not hiring enough foreign engineers at SpaceX, even though the aerospace industry has all kinds of anti-spy requirements that can get you hit with an espionage charge.

Another aspect is that the more laws you have on the books the more political and economic power are tied together, and the greater the stakes for losing that power, and therefore the more money and pressure economic power will bring on political power in order to control it. The degenerative ratchet feeds on itself, unifying state and economics in a process that automatically moves towards fascism/socialism. If everything requires government permission, and the government is incapable of giving explicit permission because it never knows exactly what is illegal, then you have constructed the worst kind of fascistic system. You have constructed a system where nothing can be confidently done and everything might be prohibited. This ratchet of money and power would ultimately destabilize the system by making every political contest have such extreme financial stakes for all parties involved, that they would commit military forces to winning.

Every industry has some sort of pile of regulations that expose you to political attacks. A nation should just wipe the slate clean every few generations, starting over with new regulations. The question isn't what you should get rid of but what you should keep. A POTUS should put together a legal team of a few hundred lawyers and comb through the law for the most absolutely essential regulations. These are things like "don't put chromium 6 in water" and "don't build bridges out of inferior grade concrete" and "pharmaceutical manufacturers have to meet certain standards of purity." These standards nearly always relate to pollution, health and safety, construction, espionage, state secrets, military stuff, basically the hard things of the world whose problems are grounded in physics and human nature. 

Everything else (except some entitlements) can be trashed, but won't be trashed, because when given a choice between doing the right thing and the wrong thing, they will do the wrong thing. This is because money and activism are still involved in the process. To truly have good laws you need an inspired and brilliant mind to go through them with a fine tooth comb and remove everything stupid and corrupt. Too many cooks spoil the law, and our system of endless committees and outside influence guarantee that the things Congress are likely to repeal are exactly those regulations that protect water quality while the things they're likely to keep are exactly the corrupt provisions that need to be repealed.

People criticize politicians for being corrupt but if you're going to be corrupt you should charge what the market will bear. Politicians are so stupid they don't include sunset clauses in all of their corrupt little laws. Everything corrupt should have a sunset clause. This is because you want to force the industry that bought the regulation to constantly pony up the dough. This enriches you, but it also reduces the amount of corrupt regulation you have to make since the checkbook of these donors is finite, or at least the amount of money they're willing to spend is. Everything should expire like every 6 months so they have to constantly pay you to reauthorize it because this lets you do less damage to the economy while maximizing your revenue. 

For awhile now I have thought that each member of Congress should have the power to kill a certain number of donors. There should be like a list of the top 100,000 donors by total contribution, and every year each member of Congress is allowed to have five of them killed. There are 535 members of Congress multiplied by 5 each. This would allow members of Congress to exterminate the donors of their rivals. Since Congress already has a 98% incumbency rate it matters very little that challengers would find it difficult to get financing and offing the donors of the opposite political party would have numerous glorious side effects not the least of which is that the government would finally run the economy instead of the economy running the government. It would transition America from a bribery-based system to an extortion based system where Joe Blow congressman calls up a billionaire and says "give me the fucking money for my campaign or you'll be dead by Friday." This is a real government and actually has the power to get things done. A government suddenly freed from the shackles of political gridlock and a government where too much disagreement has deadly consequences. It would operate more like a feudal Estates General. All it would take is a single member of Congress breaking ranks and killing their rival's donors to set off a deadly race to the bottom that would hollow out the entire donor industrial complex. Once gone real governance would be possible.

Maybe if the Senate started actually operating like a royal Parliament the population would finally wake up and start voting against incumbents. The No Kings nationwide protest demonstrate that remarkable things can happen when Trump says the quiet part out loud. To name a thing is to change it and to say you're going to create feudalism is to instantly provoke resistance to feudalism. The real system is never the actual system, never the named system. This is because as soon as any consensus about reality is achieved people move to exploit the new consensus and so the actual reality becomes an exploited consensus reality. Maybe the threat of monarchy and feudalism are exactly what the doctor ordered to make people take responsibility for their republic. 

If you really want to incite a revolution make it legal for each member of Congress to have activists killed. Like the donor quota you could have an activist quota. Just let them call anyone a terrorist and have them taken away to a CIA black site. In the beginning only Republicans might use it but everything is a race to the bottom, everything is an arms race, and eventually everyone will use it. Once that happens people really will come to see their government as an enemy. I think anything that pushes shit over a cliff might ultimately be better than the slow ratchet of legislative accumulation. Congress won't make itself accountable, won't reform itself in any way that reinforces democracy, but you can totally reform Congress in a way that pushes it over the edge, that pushes it towards a greater level of feudalism.

Who knows who will win but regardless I doubt anyone will have the foresight to repeal bad laws. Does Russia still have laws on the books from the Soviet Era? I wonder how many centuries of gunk the average European country has in it's legal code. Usually governments have to die to wipe out there destructive legal codes. Ode for a law giver who cares.