“I believe if you work your butt off and pay taxes, you should be able to easily understand and navigate the laws, tax codes, health care, and anything else the government puts in place that affects us all.” — Robert James Ritchie (Kid Rock)
When I was in college I took a business law class. (I needed an elective and it was in a time slot I could attend.) One of the things I learned about was the “reasonably prudent person” standard. Oversimplified, it states the law should be based upon how reasonable person would have acted or what that person would have foreseen. Boiled down, it holds that a normal person should be able to understand the law. At least that is how my instructor (who was a lawyer and an engineer) explained it to the class. Mind, this was back in the 1970s. Things seemed to have changed since then.
The law has grown so complex the reasonably prudent person now needs an army of specialists to navigate through the tangle that the law has become today: lawyers, accountants, medical benefits advisors, financial advisors. This is good for specialists (especially lawyers) who add little value to society when the rules are simple enough to allow average people to live their lives without requiring specialists to navigate the laws. It is not good for society as a whole, especially if that society has a representative government. The need for specialists to interpret the rules reduces productivity and encourages rent-seeking. An increasing fraction of the economy goes into overhead, while activities that add wealth shrink.
I am not decrying the need for specialists to conduct productive activities (those that actually produce a product, whether it is a brick or a book) or those that provide useful services (such as a haircut). You want those designing and building a building to know what they are doing. You want the barber cutting your hair to know what they are doing.
Rather, I object to government rules that so complicate things that the average Joe or Jane do not feel comfortable filling out their taxes unaided, need to check with lawyers and accountants before starting a routine business enterprise, and have to see an advisor to figure out how to get the health care they needed. Not because they lack the smarts to do those things in the normal course of things. Rather because government regulation has become so convoluted that they need assurance they are not walking into a government-created trap. (After all, ignorance of the is no excuse for violating it — regardless of how nonsensical regulations are.)
In the 1930s, a US Forest Ranger could carry all of the regulations relating to the Forest Service on a single sheet of 8-1/2″ × 11″ paper. Today, that ranger would get a hernia attempting pick up a printed set of all regulations. Similarly in 1797, when Congress authorized the construction of the US Navy, the entire act filled but a page and one-half of the Congressional Record. The bill enabling the continuation of the US Navy for FY2023 probably contains too many pages for a single person to pick them up (at least not without violating OSHA regulation.
We need to simplify all government regulation – and we really need to simplify it to the point where that mythical reasonably prudent person can understand it without the need for experts.
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