Glenn Reynolds tries making lemonade

The United States Code -- containing federal statutory law -- is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes.  The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117 pages long and composes 226 volumes.

No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer...

While we rightly fear a too-powerful government, this regulatory knowledge problem will ensure plenty of public stumbles and embarrassments, helping to remind people that those who seek to rule us really don’t know what they’re doing. - “Progressives can’t get past the Knowledge Problem,” Washington Examiner, April 4, 2010

Well, maybe.  A more than equally likely scenario is that of corrupt or offended bureaucrats making their targets’ lives miserable by hauling out, and enforcing, obscure or nonsensical regulations.

Thus we move from a government of (generally understood and accepted) laws to a government of (arbitrary and capricious) men.

Which doesn’t rule out “stumbles and embarrassments” a-plenty, although IMO governments that believe their legitimate functions include giving great-grandmothers criminal records for selling goldfish to underage purchasers, charging teenagers who IM nude pictures of themselves with distributing child pornography, or warping traffic laws to prey on the public are beyond embarrassment.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 16:06:47 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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