TOO MANY LAWS
(© Copyright June 9, 2004 by Ron Ewart - All Rights Reserved)

Every time legislators write a new law, no matter at what level of government, they immediately trigger three very costly events: 1) Increase government employment to analyze, research and study not only the science to justify the law, but to monitor the effects of the law; 2) Increase government employment to administer or defend the law; and 3) Increase government employment to enforce the law.

Therefore, each new law adds to Government employment and Government continuously grows, exponentially. Further, many laws can and should trigger a constitutional test. Very expensive lawyers get involved on both sides to argue their case before lower courts and then on to a state Supreme Court and ultimately the Federal Supreme Court. In almost all cases the taxpayers pick up the tab, all the result from passing just one more new law.

The movement of money in a capitalistic culture is from the manufacture of products and the sale of those products, or the sale of services, to individuals or business entities existing in that culture. Wealth creation and the movement of money from the exchange of goods and services is the fuel that drives a free economy. Every time a new law is passed, that fuel (money) is sucked away from the producing sector of our economy, rendering it less efficient, less productive and infinitely more complex.

By just sheer numbers, the more laws that are written, the less likely the entire population will even know about the laws, or understand them, or know of their consequences or penalties for violation, much less be in compliance with them. The consequence of too many laws is that huge segments of the public are totally unaware of their existence. And yet, under the law, ignorance of the law is not a defense. Then, when the hapless individual comes face-to-face with the law, it results in anger and frustration for that individual and a spiraling degradation of freedom and liberty for all of us.

Many laws are written at the insistence of lobbying or special interest groups with very narrow and purposely hidden agendas. The public never has an opportunity for real input and society as a whole is not benefited. Partisan politics often compromises a new law into meaningless, often conflicting legislation, leaving loopholes over which lawyers can argue for decades.

In the final analysis, extending legislating and law creation to its absurdity, one arrives at a point where there are so many laws that no one is in compliance and we end up losing our ability to enforce any of them. We become in fact, lawless by the very chaos that the policy makers have created.

Thus, the only answer is not in complexity, but in simplicity and fewer laws. Yes, a complex society needs laws to maintain "reasonable" societal order. But as laws increase, after a certain point, order begins to breakdown under its own weight of trying to comply with often conflicting and confusing codes, ordinances, regulations and acts. And worse, the more laws there are, the more opportunities for emotionally and financially draining lawsuits between aggrieved parties, egged on by lawyers who make their living off of human weaknesses and interpreting laws that no one else can understand.

There is an inviolate law in nature. Complexity in organisms can lead to the emergence of order. Biological evolution and diversity on Earth is a result of that law. However, it has also been shown that too much complexity in these organisms, in almost all cases, leads to chaos and finally extinction.

Ultimately, if we continue on the path we tread, we will become as a rogue spider, spinning a web from which we shall be forever entwined. Could that be our final destination? Are we to choke on our own obsessive/compulsive drive to complexity, or can we learn from the laws of nature?

"If you won't hold government accountable, it will do whatever it pleases and it is."