How long will it take me to punch holes into your legislation? - Granite Grok

How long will it take me to punch holes into your legislation?

People are going to do- well, what people are going to do.  And that is a huge problem for those in Government – they think that they have every thing sewn up into a neat package with pages and pages and pages of legislation. 

Then some regular Joe out in the Heartland or some egghead muttering to themselves in a deep, dark lab comes up with yet another instance of a "disruptive technology" throws all their carefully laid plans into the landfill.

Or some "class clown" (who actually tend to be rather inventive themselves) figures out a way to game the system?

The Law of Unintended Consequences" is well illustrated in a post titled "Coal to Gas: be careful what you wish" (emphasis mine):

This is what we in the public policy realm call “unintended consequences.” Policy makers take an action without bothering to consider that people—those darn, stubborn people—might respond to a given policy in a way that isn’t exactly what the policy makers had in mind. So, you subsidize energy-efficient refrigerators, and people turn the old one into a beer-fridge. You subsidize electric vehicles, and you wind up giving away free golf carts to rich people. You erect hurdles to using coal domestically, and it’s burned in China, even less efficiently, and with more greenhouse gas emissions. You subsidize wind energy, and you create jobs… in China. You foster policies that raise gas prices, and people find a way around them.

What’s funny is, this is exactly the kind of entrepreneurialism that the greens applaud when it cuts in their favor, but that drives them crazy when it cuts against their interests.

Starting out, laws were created to protect liberties and freedoms – don’t do this, don’t do that, and everything else gets sorted by society.  However, laws have morphed into changing and controlling behavior – and this just drives them crazy!

Problem comes up is that the wonks then go back to the drawing board to write even more legislation and regulations – and thus, we end up with the overburdening crush of both in what a programmer recognizes as "spaghetti code" – yeah, it kinda works still, but it is a morass to figure out and patch.  In software, companies will finally throw up their hands and start anew as the cost of maintaining that code is not profitable.

Problem with laws is that there is no "profit / loss" signal that gives this feedback – and those that know it best are the lawyers.  Given that their primary purpose is to know what’s written, and more laws mean more to them, why would they complain (er, sorry Tim!).

Yet, as we morph from an internally directed society (that little voice that says "don’t do that) to an externally directed one, this is going to become more and more of an issue.

>