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America Has Too Many Laws – An excess of restrictions has taken a real toll

46 points by bell-cot 2y ago

h2odragon 2y ago
https://archive.ph/aiUFt https://archive.ph/aiUFt
Finnucane 2y ago
[flagged]
bell-cot 2y ago
(For those unfamiliar - the article's authors are a current Supreme Court judge and a former Supreme Court law clerk.)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bediger4000 2y ago
I didn't see mention of copyright, which is by far the most contradictory and complicated set of laws we as middle class citizens run a foul of on an everyday basis. Why is that?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Ajedi32 2y ago
  It gets a passing mention: > A 24-year-old who downloads academic articles that don’t belong to him isn’t just reprimanded; now we threaten him with decades in federal prison.
- sjm-lbm 2y ago
  Well, the whole thing is less about general categories of law and more about specific examples - and one of those specific examples is the Aaron Swartz case, with a link to The Atlantic article about that and everything. I would say that he, at least, covers it.
  - bediger4000 2y ago
    I'm probably a little older than the average HN commenter. I've heard these "ha ha here's a dumb law about sounding a car's horn around horses" my entire life. Specific examples of bizarre, or outdated laws serve no one, and do not reveal an underlying problem other than some legislature hasn't gotten around to dumping outdated, or bizarre laws.
    - sjm-lbm 2y ago
      Yeah, agreed. Obviously I have no doubt that the rule book is currently bigger than it has been in the past, but I also know that the Cuyahoga River used to catch on fire and the ozone layer was disappearing. There's a good case to be made for rationalizing the number of laws, but merely focusing on the sheer size of the federal code and pulling out a few silly examples doesn't even come close to having a serious discussion on the topic.
- janice1999 2y ago
  Copyright serves the elite. The things those in power want to deregulate are always things that protect the public like worker and environmental laws. There was a reason that buildings went up faster in the 1930s - (poor) people died and the materials were dangerous.
rqtwteye 2y ago
I struggle with taking anything Gorsuch writes seriously. He seems to dream of a world where federal agencies have no power to regulate things but instead all disputes are decided by courts (or Congress needs to write laws that cover all cases). Going to court usually favors the party that can afford lawyers and expert witnesses. I agree that it would be good to clean up a lot of laws and rule. But considering that this criticism is coming from a person who claims to be able to divine what people had in their minds 250 years ago when they wrote a constitution makes it pretty dishonest in my view.
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  That's not a bug, that's a feature. The school of thought that Gorsuch and others subscribe to is one where the US was basically supposed to be an extension of 18th-century England, just without the Crown. This was more-or-less how the antebellum south was set up. You had peasants living in housing provided by the landed gentry in exchange for the outputs of their labor at enterprises that are held by the landed gentry. The landed gentry is the landed gentry because a higher power anointed them to be so, or because social Darwinism simply selected them as such. Those who oppose this are thus opposed to nature and cannot be entertained, much less allowed to wield the power of the state to protect what they see to be their rights. Now replace "peasant" with "working class" and "landed gentry" with "investors". Ta-da. You have the ideal system in these people's minds for the modern world.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > struggle with taking anything Gorsuch writes seriously Gorsuch wrote Bostock, the opinion granting LGBT Americans protection from workplace discrimination [1][2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bostock_v._Clayton_County https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bostock_v._Clayton_County [2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf
parkaboy 2y ago
I wish there were a solution to managing whatever the equivalent of software-creep (law-creep?) in this space. Are there any examples of countries/governments that have successfully implemented such systems. Either way, I don't like how things (hot takes from people, journalists, politicians businesses, whatever) are constantly framed as being pro/anti laws (or regulation). This seems to always at the end of the day serve "the elites" in one way or another: whether it's adding regulations to keep out competition from the little upstarts or getting rid of it to expand marketshare at the expense of consumer-harm. Question should always be pointedly reframed as: do we have the "right" laws. Not as: do we have too many or too little. This ultimately means nothing and feels like a distraction from the bigger issues. /end arm chair rant.
- delichon 2y ago
  That's the idea behind a constitution of enumerated powers, but those appear to lose their restraining force over a few generations. I'd favor an amendment placing a sunset clause on every statute, and no omnibuses, such that the legislature only has enough time in session to keep a finite set of laws in effect.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > placing a sunset clause on every statute, and no omnibuses Watch out, murder statute sunsets tomorrow and the Congress is gridlocked! Why are they gridlocked? They can’t string together broad compromises without everyone suing over what constitutes an omnibus.
    - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      Fair, but... You get the Congress you vote for. If you need Congress to work together instead of acting like idiots, vote for people who will work together instead of acting like idiots. If you won't, this is the kind of Congress you get. We haven't been feeling the pain because of the executive branch. But now Chevron is overturned... (Also, murder is going to be against state laws even without federal ones, so this won't turn into the murder crisis that you suggest.)
mugwumprk 2y ago
The irony to me is that he just voted to overturn the Chevron doctrine. There's no way that doesn't lead to a huge increase in the number of laws.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > irony to me is that he just voted to overturn the Chevron doctrine. There's no way that doesn't lead to a huge increase in the number of laws In only the most technical sense. Practically speaking, reducing the set of restrictions from laws, narrowly-constructed rules and broadly-constructed rules to just the first two will reduce restrictions. (I personally believe most of those restrictions are valid. But there are good arguments for and against Chevron.)
- InTheArena 2y ago
  Read the article, it also calls out regulations, and the growth of guidance documents.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lenerdenator 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
duxup 2y ago
I'm always skeptical of calls like this. It's an easy argument to make for sure, and likely true-ish. It's fun to come up with examples of providing paper copies to each individual. But I don't need a paper copy, and I can't remember the last time I felt compelled to read a law, maybe never? Does it matter that it's "it’s a federal crime to enter a post office while intoxicated"? Are these examples really what the author is concerned about? "By federal decree, macaroni must have a diameter between 0.11 and 0.27 inches, while vermicelli must not be more than 0.06 inches in diameter." That's fine with me, that just means there's consistency across a product... that seems almost absurd to take issue with. There are some examples later on of abuses, but those strike me as abuses that if it wasn't one misapplied law, it would be another. The existence of law when someone makes a poor choice doesn't make the law the problem. I feel like a lot of these calls are really just appeals for "reforms" that aren't there for me, they're there for those who already have an advantage over me in the legal process...
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > "By federal decree, macaroni must have a diameter between 0.11 and 0.27 inches, while vermicelli must not be more than 0.06 inches in diameter." That's fine with me, that just means there's consistency across a product... that seems almost absurd to take issue with. The point is this adds a burden to small producers, particularly upstarts, while giving anti-competitive avenues of action to incumbents. Even if you’re complying with the rule, there is a cost to proving compliance and dealing with regulators. Why shouldn’t you be able to sell macaroni if your machinery isn’t precise enough to meet those tolerances every time? (And why is that the federal government’s business.)
  - duxup 2y ago
    >Why shouldn’t you be able to sell macaroni Because there is a standard to what "macaroni" is? Otherwise call it something else. You can still sell pasta. Having standards for food is very nice for citizens. For me it makes cooking far easier knowing if something actually is what it says it is. It actually matters.
pstuart 2y ago
To quote a manager when I was starting out: "Don't bring me problems -- bring me problems and solutions". Maybe the book delves into that, but I saw nothing of that in the article. Probably one of the biggest impediments to addressing this is that Congress is horribly broken, (not by accident). I'd go further there but it's inherently political and I don't want to risk the wrath of @dang. Being ruled by law is a good thing, and many regulations are written in blood. We need to find ways to hold on to the "good parts" and trim away the rest. My techie take would be that using AI to analyze/summarize the legal code, case history of the application of same, and game theory to evaluate the efficacy and "justness" of the codes. Easy peasy, right?
TacticalCoder 2y ago
"The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state". That's thousands of years old wisdom. The government should serve the people, not the other way around. You know there's a problem when even your lawyers friend complain about the state of things.
janice1999 2y ago
> In the 1930s, the Empire State Building—the tallest in the world at the time—took a little more than 13 months to build. It cost at least 5 lives from easily preventable accidents and is filled with asbestos (which likely killed many many more from lung cancer). is this the state people want to return to?
- whoknowsidont 2y ago
  >is this the state people want to return to? Sadly, some of them do. Some of them are even in government and their whole aim is to unravel all the standards and protections we've built up for good reason.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > cost at least 5 lives from easily preventable accidents and is filled with asbestos (which likely killed many many more from lung cancer). is this the state people want to return to? There is a lot of middle ground between these extremes [1]. Manhattan’s current zoning rules, for example, almost require luxury housing only. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-percent-of-manhattans-buildings-could-not-be-built-today.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...
vlark 2y ago
There is a difference between laws and regulations. Law determine what is legal. Regulations dictate HOW to act/behave to be within the government's interpretation of the law. Courts determine whether the government's interpretation of the law is fair or not to those who bring suit. Every court decision is, to a certain extent, also a regulation.
jhp123 2y ago
I remember when the Trump team was claiming that they wanted to simplify the tax code. They held up a postcard and said that you'd file your taxes on this. Then they passed the tax bill. My taxes went up, Trump's went down, and everyone forgot about the postcard. Go figure.
- junar 2y ago
  What actually happened is that Form 1040 got sliced into multiple pages. Going from 2017 to 2018, the 1040 went from 79 lines [1] to 23 lines [2]. The remaining 50 or so lines? Moved to Schedules 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. So if your return had any amount of complexity, you probably needed more pages that year. Today's Form 1040 [3] is somewhere in the middle. The form itself has 38 lines, and the numbered schedules have been consolidated from 6 to 3. [1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--2017.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--2017.pdf [2] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--2018.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--2018.pdf [3] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--2023.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--2023.pdf
- anon291 2y ago
  Your federal taxes went down but your state charges you a lot and the feds aren't going to let that mean they get less. You should probably elect lower tax candidates to your state office so you can deduct more of your state taxes.
jarule 2y ago
He also quipped that the officials would have “multiplied at the same rate had there been no actual seamen at all.” Was that an artificial insemination joke?

46 points by bell-cot 2y ago

h2odragon 2y ago

https://archive.ph/aiUFt https://archive.ph/aiUFt

Finnucane 2y ago

[flagged]

bell-cot 2y ago

(For those unfamiliar - the article's authors are a current Supreme Court judge and a former Supreme Court law clerk.)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bediger4000 2y ago

I didn't see mention of copyright, which is by far the most contradictory and complicated set of laws we as middle class citizens run a foul of on an everyday basis. Why is that?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Ajedi32 2y ago
It gets a passing mention: > A 24-year-old who downloads academic articles that don’t belong to him isn’t just reprimanded; now we threaten him with decades in federal prison.
sjm-lbm 2y ago
Well, the whole thing is less about general categories of law and more about specific examples - and one of those specific examples is the Aaron Swartz case, with a link to The Atlantic article about that and everything. I would say that he, at least, covers it.
- bediger4000 2y ago
  I'm probably a little older than the average HN commenter. I've heard these "ha ha here's a dumb law about sounding a car's horn around horses" my entire life. Specific examples of bizarre, or outdated laws serve no one, and do not reveal an underlying problem other than some legislature hasn't gotten around to dumping outdated, or bizarre laws.
  - sjm-lbm 2y ago
    Yeah, agreed. Obviously I have no doubt that the rule book is currently bigger than it has been in the past, but I also know that the Cuyahoga River used to catch on fire and the ozone layer was disappearing. There's a good case to be made for rationalizing the number of laws, but merely focusing on the sheer size of the federal code and pulling out a few silly examples doesn't even come close to having a serious discussion on the topic.
janice1999 2y ago
Copyright serves the elite. The things those in power want to deregulate are always things that protect the public like worker and environmental laws. There was a reason that buildings went up faster in the 1930s - (poor) people died and the materials were dangerous.

rqtwteye 2y ago

I struggle with taking anything Gorsuch writes seriously. He seems to dream of a world where federal agencies have no power to regulate things but instead all disputes are decided by courts (or Congress needs to write laws that cover all cases). Going to court usually favors the party that can afford lawyers and expert witnesses. I agree that it would be good to clean up a lot of laws and rule. But considering that this criticism is coming from a person who claims to be able to divine what people had in their minds 250 years ago when they wrote a constitution makes it pretty dishonest in my view.

lenerdenator 2y ago
That's not a bug, that's a feature. The school of thought that Gorsuch and others subscribe to is one where the US was basically supposed to be an extension of 18th-century England, just without the Crown. This was more-or-less how the antebellum south was set up. You had peasants living in housing provided by the landed gentry in exchange for the outputs of their labor at enterprises that are held by the landed gentry. The landed gentry is the landed gentry because a higher power anointed them to be so, or because social Darwinism simply selected them as such. Those who oppose this are thus opposed to nature and cannot be entertained, much less allowed to wield the power of the state to protect what they see to be their rights. Now replace "peasant" with "working class" and "landed gentry" with "investors". Ta-da. You have the ideal system in these people's minds for the modern world.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> struggle with taking anything Gorsuch writes seriously Gorsuch wrote Bostock, the opinion granting LGBT Americans protection from workplace discrimination [1][2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bostock_v._Clayton_County https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bostock_v._Clayton_County [2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf

parkaboy 2y ago

I wish there were a solution to managing whatever the equivalent of software-creep (law-creep?) in this space. Are there any examples of countries/governments that have successfully implemented such systems. Either way, I don't like how things (hot takes from people, journalists, politicians businesses, whatever) are constantly framed as being pro/anti laws (or regulation). This seems to always at the end of the day serve "the elites" in one way or another: whether it's adding regulations to keep out competition from the little upstarts or getting rid of it to expand marketshare at the expense of consumer-harm. Question should always be pointedly reframed as: do we have the "right" laws. Not as: do we have too many or too little. This ultimately means nothing and feels like a distraction from the bigger issues. /end arm chair rant.

delichon 2y ago
That's the idea behind a constitution of enumerated powers, but those appear to lose their restraining force over a few generations. I'd favor an amendment placing a sunset clause on every statute, and no omnibuses, such that the legislature only has enough time in session to keep a finite set of laws in effect.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > placing a sunset clause on every statute, and no omnibuses Watch out, murder statute sunsets tomorrow and the Congress is gridlocked! Why are they gridlocked? They can’t string together broad compromises without everyone suing over what constitutes an omnibus.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    Fair, but... You get the Congress you vote for. If you need Congress to work together instead of acting like idiots, vote for people who will work together instead of acting like idiots. If you won't, this is the kind of Congress you get. We haven't been feeling the pain because of the executive branch. But now Chevron is overturned... (Also, murder is going to be against state laws even without federal ones, so this won't turn into the murder crisis that you suggest.)

mugwumprk 2y ago

The irony to me is that he just voted to overturn the Chevron doctrine. There's no way that doesn't lead to a huge increase in the number of laws.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> irony to me is that he just voted to overturn the Chevron doctrine. There's no way that doesn't lead to a huge increase in the number of laws In only the most technical sense. Practically speaking, reducing the set of restrictions from laws, narrowly-constructed rules and broadly-constructed rules to just the first two will reduce restrictions. (I personally believe most of those restrictions are valid. But there are good arguments for and against Chevron.)
InTheArena 2y ago
Read the article, it also calls out regulations, and the growth of guidance documents.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

lenerdenator 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

duxup 2y ago

I'm always skeptical of calls like this. It's an easy argument to make for sure, and likely true-ish. It's fun to come up with examples of providing paper copies to each individual. But I don't need a paper copy, and I can't remember the last time I felt compelled to read a law, maybe never? Does it matter that it's "it’s a federal crime to enter a post office while intoxicated"? Are these examples really what the author is concerned about? "By federal decree, macaroni must have a diameter between 0.11 and 0.27 inches, while vermicelli must not be more than 0.06 inches in diameter." That's fine with me, that just means there's consistency across a product... that seems almost absurd to take issue with. There are some examples later on of abuses, but those strike me as abuses that if it wasn't one misapplied law, it would be another. The existence of law when someone makes a poor choice doesn't make the law the problem. I feel like a lot of these calls are really just appeals for "reforms" that aren't there for me, they're there for those who already have an advantage over me in the legal process...

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> "By federal decree, macaroni must have a diameter between 0.11 and 0.27 inches, while vermicelli must not be more than 0.06 inches in diameter." That's fine with me, that just means there's consistency across a product... that seems almost absurd to take issue with. The point is this adds a burden to small producers, particularly upstarts, while giving anti-competitive avenues of action to incumbents. Even if you’re complying with the rule, there is a cost to proving compliance and dealing with regulators. Why shouldn’t you be able to sell macaroni if your machinery isn’t precise enough to meet those tolerances every time? (And why is that the federal government’s business.)
- duxup 2y ago
  >Why shouldn’t you be able to sell macaroni Because there is a standard to what "macaroni" is? Otherwise call it something else. You can still sell pasta. Having standards for food is very nice for citizens. For me it makes cooking far easier knowing if something actually is what it says it is. It actually matters.

pstuart 2y ago

To quote a manager when I was starting out: "Don't bring me problems -- bring me problems and solutions". Maybe the book delves into that, but I saw nothing of that in the article. Probably one of the biggest impediments to addressing this is that Congress is horribly broken, (not by accident). I'd go further there but it's inherently political and I don't want to risk the wrath of @dang. Being ruled by law is a good thing, and many regulations are written in blood. We need to find ways to hold on to the "good parts" and trim away the rest. My techie take would be that using AI to analyze/summarize the legal code, case history of the application of same, and game theory to evaluate the efficacy and "justness" of the codes. Easy peasy, right?

TacticalCoder 2y ago

"The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state". That's thousands of years old wisdom. The government should serve the people, not the other way around. You know there's a problem when even your lawyers friend complain about the state of things.

janice1999 2y ago

> In the 1930s, the Empire State Building—the tallest in the world at the time—took a little more than 13 months to build. It cost at least 5 lives from easily preventable accidents and is filled with asbestos (which likely killed many many more from lung cancer). is this the state people want to return to?

whoknowsidont 2y ago
>is this the state people want to return to? Sadly, some of them do. Some of them are even in government and their whole aim is to unravel all the standards and protections we've built up for good reason.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> cost at least 5 lives from easily preventable accidents and is filled with asbestos (which likely killed many many more from lung cancer). is this the state people want to return to? There is a lot of middle ground between these extremes [1]. Manhattan’s current zoning rules, for example, almost require luxury housing only. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-percent-of-manhattans-buildings-could-not-be-built-today.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...

vlark 2y ago

There is a difference between laws and regulations. Law determine what is legal. Regulations dictate HOW to act/behave to be within the government's interpretation of the law. Courts determine whether the government's interpretation of the law is fair or not to those who bring suit. Every court decision is, to a certain extent, also a regulation.

jhp123 2y ago

I remember when the Trump team was claiming that they wanted to simplify the tax code. They held up a postcard and said that you'd file your taxes on this. Then they passed the tax bill. My taxes went up, Trump's went down, and everyone forgot about the postcard. Go figure.

junar 2y ago
What actually happened is that Form 1040 got sliced into multiple pages. Going from 2017 to 2018, the 1040 went from 79 lines [1] to 23 lines [2]. The remaining 50 or so lines? Moved to Schedules 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. So if your return had any amount of complexity, you probably needed more pages that year. Today's Form 1040 [3] is somewhere in the middle. The form itself has 38 lines, and the numbered schedules have been consolidated from 6 to 3. [1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--2017.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--2017.pdf [2] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--2018.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--2018.pdf [3] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--2023.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--2023.pdf
anon291 2y ago
Your federal taxes went down but your state charges you a lot and the feds aren't going to let that mean they get less. You should probably elect lower tax candidates to your state office so you can deduct more of your state taxes.

jarule 2y ago

He also quipped that the officials would have “multiplied at the same rate had there been no actual seamen at all.” Was that an artificial insemination joke?