Think Government is too big? Here's a great metric - Granite Grok

Think Government is too big? Here’s a great metric

From a Washington Examiner piece called Progressives can’t get past the Knowledge Problem by Glen Harlan Reynolds of Instapundit fame:

The United States Code — containing federal statutory law — is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117 pages long and composes 226 volumes.

No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer. This means, of course, that when Congress changes the law, it not only can’t be aware of all the real-world complications it’s producing, it can’t even understand the legal and regulatory implications of what it’s doing.

There’s good news and bad news in that. The bad news is obvious: We’re governed not just by people who do screw up constantly, but by people who can’t help but screw up constantly. So long as the government is this large and overweening, no amount of effort at securing smarter people or "better" rules will do any good: Incompetence is built into the system.

His take is that while Progressives can and never will admit it, Progressivism is doomed to failure.    The basic tenet of Progressivism is that a group of dispassionate experts can successfully "manage" society for the benefit of all – yet continually, history has shown that to not be true.

In their efforts to manage society to date, they have already promulgated enough laws and regulations so that NO ONE (as like what is in their comprehensive healthcare reform) can now reasonably understand it.  Already!

And they want to do more, and believe that they won’t suffer the negative results of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Like that of his target, Henry Waxman (D-CA) that is trying to strong arm those that have brought up "bad PR Obamacare costs" for simply complying with the law that Government has already decreed be followed.  What Progressives don’t understand is:

in any large system, a nudge "here" can result in one or more "bad" outcomes "there".

people will react to change in ways that are often far different and in absolute opposite ways that the "law designers" intended – again, throwing off chaos in the process.

It is not the case that Americans are ungovernable, it is the case that the governors are not up to the task to govern (and never will be, be they Progressives or not).  Only by setting a "floor" and allowing  the citizens to act in their own legal self-interest will the system work.  Otherwise, and as Reynolds is wont to say, "We’re in the best of hands!"

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