Complex Societies Need Simple Laws

“If you have 10,000 regulations,” Winston Churchill said, “you destroy all respect for law.”


He was right. But Churchill never imagined a government that would add 10,000 year after year. That’s what we have in America. We have 160,000 pages of rules from the feds alone. States and localities have probably doubled that. We have so many rules that legal specialists can’t keep up. Criminal lawyers call the rules “incomprehensible.” They are. They are also “uncountable.” Congress has created so many criminal offenses that the American Bar Association says it would be futile to even attempt to estimate the total.


So what do the politicians and bureaucrats of the permanent government do? They pass more rules.

John Stossel. Read the whole thing.