Drowning in laws

I've written on several occasions about the need for smaller, less intrusive government. An article in the New York Daily News has summarized all my objections to the present state of affairs, given hideously many examples of government overreach, and shown why too much government is such a disaster. Here's a few excerpts.

Legal mandates and entitlements have accumulated, like sediment in the harbor, until it is almost impossible for Americans to get anywhere without trudging through a treacherous legal swamp. Only big businesses, not small entrepreneurs, have the size (and legal staffs) to power through the legal sludge.

. . .

... the land of opportunity is more like legal quicksand. Small business owners face legal challenges at every step. Municipalities requires multiple and often nonsensical forms to do business. Labor laws expose them to legal threats by any disgruntled employee. Mandates to provide costly employment benefits impose high hurdles to hiring new employees. Well-meaning but impossibly complex laws impose requirements to prevent consumer fraud, provide disability access, prevent hiring illegal immigrants, display warnings and notices and prevent scores of other potential evils. The tax code is incomprehensible.

All of this requires legal and other overhead - costing 50% more per employee for small businesses than big businesses.

The sheer volume of law suffocates innovative instincts, while distrust of lawsuits discourages ordinary human choices. Why take a chance on the eager young person applying for a job when, if it doesn't work out, you might get sued for discrimination? Why take the risk of expanding production in another state when that requires duplicating legal risks and overhead? Why bother to start a business at all?

. . .

Doctors are conditioned by our lawsuit culture to see patients as potential plaintiffs and practice medicine wearing blinders of reimbursement bureaucracy. Every incentive is upside down - driving up health care costs to almost double that of other developed countries. The new healthcare bill does almost nothing to fix this, and instead stacks 2,700 pages of new requirements on top of the giant heap of old law.

Schools are bureaucratic viper pits. Mandates from Washington, from state capitals and from aggressive local districts transform teachers into pedagogical drones. Because of fear of lawsuits, they're told never to put an arm around a crying child. Good teachers quit, surveys show, because they don't feel free to do what's right, or indeed, even to be themselves.

Government itself is choking on accumulated law. The simplest choices take years to grind through labyrinthian requirements mandated by obsolete laws. Good public management takes superman, because accountability is nonexistent. Firing an insubordinate civil servant is even harder than firing a teacher.

. . .

Clearing away the poisonous legal overgrowth does not require genius. It just requires different choices. Balancing budgets demands we pare back legal mandates, entitlements and subsidies. Containing healthcare costs requires realigning incentives so that patients and doctors have a financial responsibility to be prudent. But those choices are impossible in the current legal jungle.

"Good ideas to reform government," New York City Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith recently remarked, "are often illegal."

America can't move forward until it cleans out this legal swamp. The accretion of law has made democracy inert - a sludge heap of programs and entitlements swarming with special interests - while also slowly suffocating the American spirit.

Changing leaders or parties will not solve this problem. Decades of accumulated law and bureaucracy have made it impossible for anyone to use common sense. A new President can ride into Washington on the mighty steed of public opinion - Yes We Can! - but will immediately get stuck in the bureaucratic goo.

. . .

"We are not far from the point," Nobel economist Friedrich Hayek warned in 1960, "where the deliberately organized forces of society may destroy those spontaneous forces which have made advance possible." We may finally be there. Government is basically bankrupt, and the accretion of law is suffocating individual initiative. Nothing will work until we clean it out.

There's more at the link. Essential reading for anti-statists.

Peter