Complex Societies Need Simple Laws - Stop The Madness!

 "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.

That's not good. It paralyzes life.

Politicians sometimes say they understand the problem. They promise to "simplify." But they rarely do. Mostly, they come up with new rules. It's just natural. It's how the public measures politicians. Schoolchildren on Washington tours ask, "What laws did you pass?" If they don't pass new laws, the media whine about the "do-nothing Congress."

This is also not good.

When so much is illegal, common sense dies. Out of fear of breaking rules, people stop innovating, trying, helping.

Think I exaggerate? Consider what happened in Britain, a country even more rule-bound than America. A man had an epileptic seizure and fell into a shallow pond. Rescue workers might have saved him, but they wouldn't enter the 3-foot-deep pond. Why? Because "safety" rules passed after rescuers drowned in a river now prohibited "emergency workers" from entering water above their ankles. Only 30 minutes later, when rescue workers with "stage 2 training" arrived, did they enter the water, discover that the man was dead and carry him to the approved inflatable medical tent. Twenty other cops, firemen and "rescuers" stood next to the pond and watched.

The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, sometimes called the first libertarian thinker, said, "The more artificial taboos and restrictions there are in the world, the more the people are impoverished.

... The more that laws and regulations are given prominence, the more thieves and robbers there will be." He complained that there were "laws and regulations more numerous than the hairs of an ox." What would he have thought of our world?

Big-government advocates will say that as society grows more complex, laws must multiply to keep up. The opposite is true. It is precisely because society is unfathomably complex that laws must be kept simple. No legislature can possibly prescribe rules for the complex network of uncountable transactions and acts of cooperation that take place every day. Not only is the knowledge that would be required to make such a regulatory regime work unavailable to the planners, it doesn't actually exist, because people don't know what they will want or do until they confront alternatives in the real world. Any attempt to manage a modern society is more like a bull in a darkened china shop than a finely tuned machine. No wonder the schemes of politicians go awry.

F.A. Hayek wisely said, "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." Another Nobel laureate, James M. Buchanan, put it this way: "Economics is the art of putting parameters on our utopias."

Barack Obama and his ilk in both parties don't want parameters on their utopias. They think the world is subject to their manipulation. That idea was debunked years ago.

"With good men and strong governments everything was considered feasible," the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote. But with the advent of economics, "it was learned that ... there is something operative which power and force are unable to alter and to which they must adjust themselves if they hope to achieve success, in precisely the same way as they must taken into account the laws of nature."

I wish our politicians knew that. I wish they'd stop their presumptuous schemes.

We need to end the orgy of rule-making at once and embrace the simple rules that true liberals like America's founders envisioned.

Original article by John Stossel

The Video Congress Does Not Want You To See (Video)

While most of the country is experiencing an economic meltdown, 1 in 7 members of Congress have seen dramatic increases in their net worth. How is this possible? Because those leeches don't have to play by the same rules you and I do.

Wake Up America!!

Warren Buffett: Stop Coddling the Super-Rich!

Warren Buffett has urged U.S. lawmakers to raise taxes on the country's super-rich to help cut the budget deficit, saying such a move will not hurt investments. 

Billionaire Warren Buffett urged U.S. lawmakers Monday to raise taxes on the country's super-rich to help cut the budget deficit, saying such a move will not hurt investments.

"My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It's time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice," The 80-year-old "Oracle of Omaha" wrote in an opinion article in The New York Times.

Buffett, one of the world's richest men and chairman of conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway Inc , said his federal tax bill last year was $6,938,744.

"That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income - and that's actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent," he said.
 

Lawmakers engaged in a partisan battle over spending and taxes for more than three months before agreeing on August 2 to raise the $14.3 trillion U.S. debt ceiling, avoiding a U.S. default.

"Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country's fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness," Buffett said.
Story: 3 ways to get more return on your savings

Buffett said higher taxes for the rich will not discourage investment.

"I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone - not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 - shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain," he said

"People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off."

Article courtesy of MSNBC.com 

How Many of YOUR Liberties Are You Willing To Give Up?

Senator Rand Paul tells Congress: "We're told we won't be able to capture terrorists without giving up some of our liberties.."

  We Know This to be a LIE yet we allow it to go on..

Wake Up America! 

 Do not tolerate those empowered BY YOU to dismantle YOUR Freedoms as provided by the wisdom of our Founding Fathers!

Demand of your elected officials to abide by The U.S. Constitution or you will promptly elect them out of office!

Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither 

- Benjamin Franklin

Jindal Says Congress Should Work Part-Time

Every once in a while a politician comes along who actually makes some sense. Thanks Bobby Jindal for your wisdom!

Gov. Bobby Jindal says the United States would be better off if members of Congress spent less time in Washington.

In an interview this week with Human Events, the Louisiana Republican, a potential 2012 presidential candidate, said U.S. lawmakers should work part-time, be term-limited and not allowed to become lobbyists once they leave Congress.

"When they live under the same rules and laws they passed for the rest of us, maybe you'd see some more common sense coming out of Washington, D.C." he told the conservative publication. "Instead, you got a permanent governing political class."

Jindal, who once served as a congressman, cited Mark Twain in his proposal.

"We used to pay farmers not to grow crops, let's pay congressmen to stay out of Washington, D.C.," he said. "Mark Twain said that our liberty, our wallets were safest when the legislature's not in session." 

It turns out members of Congress aren't spending that much time in Washington anyway. Lawmakers work 128 days or less per year and an average of 7.4 hours per day. 

Rank-and-file members of the House and Senate make $174,000 per year. Based on the average American 52-week year, that amounts to $669 per day but calculated on Congress' 128-day year, lawmakers are taking home twice the daily pay -- $1,359 per day - for about half the working time.

Based on a normal 40-hour workweek, lawmakers make $84 per hour. But figuring on their actual 37-hour workweek, they make $90 per hour.

Jindal's proposal may not be so far-fetched given the rising cost of running Congress -- more than $5 billion for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, according to Legistorm, a website that tracks congressional salaries and staffing.

Operating costs have soared 89 percent over the past decade, rising three times faster than the rate for national inflation, according to the Capitol News Connection based on data from Legistorm. The publication found that congressional salaries grew 39 percent from 2001 to 2009 and security expenses for the Capitol Police increased 860 percent in the past 10 years.

And there are plenty of part-time state legislatures that could provide a business model. In 17 states, including Utah, New Hampshire, North Dakota and South Dakota, lawmakers work part-time, making an average of $16,000 and relying on other sources of income for a living, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In 23 other states, including Alaska, Connecticut, Texas and South Carolina, lawmakers say they spend more than two-thirds of a full-time job legislating, but only make an average of $35,300, forcing them to find other sources of income, the group said. 

In the other 10 states, including California, New York, Pennsylvania and Florida, lawmakers work full-time or close to it and make an average of $68,600, or enough money without relying on outside income, the group said.

Source: FoxNews