Laws and More Laws
Interesting tidbit from Mary Lou Seymour's Liberty Action Of The Week newsletter: Over in Jolly Ol' England, Tony Blair's government has passed 3000 new criminal laws in the nine years he's been at the helm. That's about one law for every day he's been in power.
Mind you, that's just criminal laws, I don't believe that counts increased surveillance and privacy intrusion type laws. I knew the British were authoritarians at heart, so I guess that's no surprise.
Then again, are they that much worse than us Americans? I don't have the numbers as far as new laws passed on the federal level. I don't know if they'd equal Blair's record, or not. I'll go out on a limb and say maybe not.
But I did find some numbers for California:
According to San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Jill Stewart, California has passed some 47,000 laws over the last ten years. If I'm doing the math right, that's 4,700 new laws per year. That beats Tony Blair's record.
Of course, she's referring to all laws, not just criminal laws. Still, I'll give the Governator credit, just as Stewart does. Shwarzenegger gave us a new record low last year by vetoing 311 proposed laws. Let's hope he keeps it up and gives us a new record low this year.
posted by Fred Mangels @ 12:41 PM
7 comments
7 Comments:
Fred, no government expects people to follow the law and thus governments make excessive laws so that they can cash in on the guilt people feel for breaking a law.
The trouble is we now have a legislative system whereby our elected officials must 'earn thier keep' by showing they are doing something, by passing laws, getting bills passed.
As laws pile upon laws, and the system gets more and more cumbersome it will be impossible to untangle the mess.
Stupid laws like the new one that says you have to have your headlights on if it is raining or your windshield wipers are on, passed by oour own lovely state legislators is just one example.
Let's elect people who vow to repeal stupid laws.
In the meantime, Patty and Wes, how about passing a law that says we enforce the ones we already have, like the ones against meth and rape, before we go micromanaging people's lives.
amen 4:19
Passing too many laws is a sign of problems in the system where we don't trust our judges to do the right thing and second guess their judgements if we don't agree with them. We then pass more bullshit laws in an effort to take away the power we gave them in the first place. It's a clusterfuck for sure.
or we pass more laws to try to get them to enforce the ones that are already on the books, but we reword them and the whole thing gets more and more cumbersome. the new laws don't get enforced either so we continue to add to them. our elected officials are so proud of what they have done, no one takes a longer view.
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Problem is that most gov't officials are more concerned about keeping their jobs than they are about doing the right thing. Most people if they had a choice of taking money or doing the right thing are going to do what profits them the most, sadly most choose the bigger bank account.
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