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Quote of the Day: Navigating the Law
“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.
Published in Group Writing
The “reasonable man” or I suppose today “reasonably prudent person” standard was an invention and constant inhabitant of the common law. Common law is uncodified and sometimes called judge-made law, because it is the law outside statutes enacted by the legislature (or written by the king). and therefore codified.
It is the laws constantly enacted and changed by the legislature and expanded/interpreted by bureaucratic regulation that the ordinary person cannot hope to navigate and “know.”
For example, in today’s environmental regulations, “navigable waters” includes stream that you could not fit a boat into.
The horrible complexity is crazy and terribly wrong.
It is a feature and not a bug. The point is that any citizen can be prosecuted at any time for violating some law/regulation of which he was not aware. Just make a sufficient nuisance of yourself by acting like a free American that TPTB take notice. They have the hammer already in hand thanks to that complexity.
Thanks, Seawriter. This resonated with me. Paperwork related to healthcare, taxes, student aid, etc. overwhelms me so that I don’t even try to do it by myself. I might get through a few basic items, but then there are always going to be questions that stump me–and consequences if I make an error.
I have an MBA (which in theory means I have some smarts). Regardless, I do not do my own taxes. Too much risk. My accountant is a great guy, but it’s still money I could spend more productively.
That’s what bothers me the most.
No more “poison pills.” They take a bill everybody is in favor of and hide something on page 4,032 that they know the Republicans will vote down on principle. So a bill that outlaws drowning kittens has a paragraph that allocates $143 trillion dollars for to giving free lipstick to trans women, and when we vote no, they go on the news and say “The Republicans hate kittens.”
Found on Reddit (I highlighted Section 3) :
I salute and support attempts to simplify laws, but those attempts will only get so far. We have complex laws because we have a complex society. You can’t have the latter without the former.
It’s like a modern car. If you want a car that’s easy to operate, with a very comfortable ride, with smooth transmission, with anti-lock brakes, stability control, a navigation system, airbags and tons of other safety features, that integrates with your phone, and on and on – it’s going to be a complex machine.
Its the same with a modern society.
Not to say there isn’t room for improvement, but I’ll take a complex society with complicated laws over a primitive society with simple laws any day.
Absolutely.
And fwiw, ignorance of the law used to be an excuse, or at least limit culpability.
If most people don’t know whether something they might do is a crime, it says a lot about the government – both the law makers and the education establishment – and really not much about the people.
Still, it wouldn’t be fair to believe that the aim of our government is to create a populace inert with uncertainty, highly dependent on experts, and compliant enough to hunker down and pay taxes in hopes of not being audited. Would it?
No, it wouldn’t be fair to believe that. It’s true, though.
Part of the complexity of the law and regulations can be attributed to the language used, which seems to be designed purposely to be incomprehensible. Legal documents use 400 words to say what could plainly be said in ten words.
Then you would not need experts. Less opportunity for graft and rent-seeking.
I think the opposite.
The more complex the society, the less complex the laws must be.
Why?
Because the simpler the society, the more capable it is of being competently governed by the crude instrument of law enforcement.
Indeed. Thus:
It is usually the case that the complexity of the laws is due to rent-seeking, graft, and other forms of corruption.
Incorrect. There is a maxim that ignorance of the law is no excuse. Most of the regulatory law fails to require any intent before prosecution and conviction.
In the interest of simplicity:
This post is part of the Quote of the Day (QOTD) Series, which is one of the group writing projects here on Ricochet. The other is the monthly group writing theme organized by @cliffordbrown, currently featuring musings from members on “Folly.” The QOTD Signup Sheet for April is here. There are many days in April still unclaimed if you have a quote to share.
And I would add, what would legislators do when every law that’s fit to make, has been made? Do they resign and close up shop? No. Do they cut their hours and their pay? No. They gird themselves, cast their eyes about and make unfit laws.
Often this amounts to finding the fringe cases and legislating thoughts, speech, free association and micromanagement of whatever comes to their awareness.
Thus, three felonies a day.
Personally, I’d like my street raised from 35 to 36 miles per hour. I think I can make a compelling case for it. Who do I have to contribute to? I could probably get the sign-making industry on board.
Complexly written law dis-empowers (is that a word????) the citizen and empowers the government, the bureaucracy, the lawyer class and the autocrat, making it harder and harder for the citizens to not just conduct his everyday life but also to directly take part in the governance of the country. That is an invitation to tyranny, something that politicos of all stripes are more than willing to accept.
You missed my point entirely, but perhaps that’s my fault. I am aware of the maxim, and I believe that the complexity of the laws makes it difficult if not impossible for even a good citizen to follow the laws in all cases, or even be aware of them. That’s the feature I was referring to, intentional complexity.
“Did you really think we want those laws observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them to be broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against… We’re after power and we mean it… There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Reardon, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Thanks for saying it better than I did.
Yes, I agree that the trend to more complex laws impotentiates the population. Everything from seatbelt and car seat laws, to multi-sex bathroom laws. But especially tax laws.
And here I thought that laws were a matter of petty personal greed and preserving the prestige and lifestyle of the semi-famous.
Do laws, as a commodity, follow the law of supply and demand? If the demand is paid in the form of compliance or respect for the law, I would say it does.
Complex laws also benefit large entrenched organizations by keeping upstart competitors afraid to get going or to expand into new business or territory. Large organizations can afford the lawyers and compliance employees to reduce the probability of being held liable for violations, and probably even helped to write the law or regulation. Such compliance costs are a much smaller portion of overall expenses for a company like GE or Google or General Motors than they are for new prospective competitors. So established companies favor complex laws, which make it hard to remove them.
Complex laws also benefit the politicians who enact them. Complex laws guarantee that a steady stream of lobbyists and donors are trying to curry favor with the politicians.
Free the citizens from big corporations: Deregulate.
It wouldn’t be fair. But it would be insufficiently cynical 😎
I don’t think complexity is exactly the problem. It’s more the ambiguity and contradiction in the laws, such that there is no way of knowing if one is complying or not. A complexity that provides clarity wouldn’t be so bad.