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Sure.
It would be a meta-law. That every new law is required to have a sunset clause of < 50 years. Then every generation will be subject to a legal setting that is relevant to its own context, and not that of many generations before. Laws would stop needlessly accumulating. I think the revolutionaries' ideal of civil disobedience driving the testing and rejection of bad laws was on the right track, but if you keep making more and more laws faster and faster, there's no way to keep up with them, no way to make sure they are rigorously tested in court. We live in a society where police may use your words against you, but not for you; increasingly the public is being instructed not to talk to police if at all possible. Any misstatement, and in most cases any statement at all is likely to transgress one law or another. While every law probably made sense at the time it was passed, under the circumstances that lawmakers considered it (although that is increasingly untrue, or at least, the circumstances considered are becoming more and more optimistic), few laws make sense when applied algorithmically, and unfortunately it is often difficult to distinguish the two senses when a law is broken. Chuck 'em out.
Laws are important to protect us from one another. There needs to be some structure to provide recourse against people who are violent or negligent or abusive or steal things, and there needs to be some structure to separate crazy people from those they might hurt. I think those sorts of laws make it easier for people to be human to one another. But I think that the smaller the laws get, the more petty, the more you try to solve problems with government that should be solved between people, the more you separate a community and make strangers of each other. And that's something I'd like to have stop.
Sure.
It would be a meta-law. That every new law is required to have a sunset clause of < 50 years. Then every generation will be subject to a legal setting that is relevant to its own context, and not that of many generations before. Laws would stop needlessly accumulating. I think the revolutionaries' ideal of civil disobedience driving the testing and rejection of bad laws was on the right track, but if you keep making more and more laws faster and faster, there's no way to keep up with them, no way to make sure they are rigorously tested in court. We live in a society where police may use your words against you, but not for you; increasingly the public is being instructed not to talk to police if at all possible. Any misstatement, and in most cases any statement at all is likely to transgress one law or another. While every law probably made sense at the time it was passed, under the circumstances that lawmakers considered it (although that is increasingly untrue, or at least, the circumstances considered are becoming more and more optimistic), few laws make sense when applied algorithmically, and unfortunately it is often difficult to distinguish the two senses when a law is broken. Chuck 'em out.
Laws are important to protect us from one another. There needs to be some structure to provide recourse against people who are violent or negligent or abusive or steal things, and there needs to be some structure to separate crazy people from those they might hurt. I think those sorts of laws make it easier for people to be human to one another. But I think that the smaller the laws get, the more petty, the more you try to solve problems with government that should be solved between people, the more you separate a community and make strangers of each other. And that's something I'd like to have stop.
