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Heinlen in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" introduces the idea of a legislature with 2 chambers. One for creating laws and the other for getting rid of them. The threshold for creating them being higher.

The way it is now, everything is geared towards "doing" things, and credit is received for "accomplishments". Its usually much harder to undo things. It would be refreshing to have specialists in undoing things.

Has that ever been tried in practice?

Under Icelandic Viking law, every year one man had to recite the law. (I believe this was given one day.) Anything he forgot to include was no longer the law.

Different system, but some thematic similarities.

Wasn't that one of Trump's promises, that for every new regulation, two old ones had to go?

Not sure about with laws, but similar things have been tried with regulations. See http://redtapereduction.com/BC_Reg_Reform_Model.aspx but in brief:

* Around 2001, voters in British Columbia elected a government with a specific campaign promise to reduce "regulation" by 1/3.

* Initially this was accomplished by among other things setting a rule that for every new regulation introduced two existing ones had to be eliminated.

* Then the status quo was maintained by mandating a 1-for-1 rule (each new regulation requires elimination of a existing one).

* In 2015, the government of Canada introduced its own 1-for-1 rule.

There are obviously complications around what constitutes "one regulation", which neither my summary nor the linked article completely capture.

You could argue that the Supreme Court has the ability to strike laws down but not create them, though in a very limited way.

> The way it is now, everything is geared towards "doing" things, and credit is received for "accomplishments"

Repealing a law is doing something, and people frequently point to it as an accomplishment (or goal, if not yet done) if they think the law is unpopular with their constituency.

Just because it can be explained in that way does not make it so. Getting rid of things is much harder that adding things. We see this in systems all the time. Layers and layers and layers are added, but seldom taken away. We also see this in the law.

Probably the last politician who was proud of saying no was Calvin Coolidge. The vast majority of politicians are wired the other way.

Sounds like legacy source code. The law needs some serious refactoring.

IMO, there should be automatic sunset provision in every law passed in this country, like the one existed for the Patriotic Act, and reviewed, renewed or expired every 5 or 10 years.

Great, now there's a legislative breakdown on the week that that the murder law had to be re-passed, and it's legal until Congress resumes...

Why would fundamental laws such as violence or theft need expiry or review?

Much like the constitution there should be a baseline and non-aggression seems like an obvious first law.

Very much agree. It would be great if laws sunset after no more than 10 years if only a mere majority wanted the law. With a super majority, then the law could last, say 50 years.

This would allow for more experimentation and for consensus building. As it is now, the law is always in the context "and forevermore, it shall be this way". If the context was, let's try this for a few years and see what happens, it would be a less contentious thing. Without the imposed time limits, partisans grab as much as they can whenever they can.

Ancient Isrealite law had something similar with the jubilee. Every 50 years, debt was forgiven and many other things reset. This tended to keep things more balanced.

Texas has a form of this. Every state agency (with a handful of exceptions) will automatically be abolished every 5-10 years absent explicit action by the legislature.

Yes, and this resulted in a fairly unpleasant fiasco a few months ago in which the governor of Texas had to call an emergency session in order to renew the Texas Medical Board's existence because a senator had held it hostage in order to try and force through a bill banning trans women from using women's restrooms.

(A lot of the national press incorrectly portrayed this as the Texas governor calling an emergency session to ban trans women from women's restrooms. While that was debated as part of the emergency session, it wasn't the goal and the governor made allowing it or anything else to be debated conditional on passing the critical Texas Medical Board renewal - forcing the supporters of the bathroom bill to pass that first and give up their leverage in order to get a bathroom bill vote they would inevitably lose. The national media reporting on this was terrible.)

I hate the Patriot Act too, but beware unintended consequences.

How do you feel about laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

I think that law continues to serve our society well. And I'm certain it would not be renewed by our current Federal government.

Ditto for regulations on water, sewage, pharma purity and many other laws that facilitate civilization. It's all very nice to say 'sunset every law', but we depend on many of them being in place.

Like removing redundant rivets on an aircraft. You can't be sure which ones are critical. The cost of discovering that can be quite high.

> How do you feel about laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964? I think that law continues to serve our society well.

Maybe certain parts of it - yes. But I've read many articles talking about how housing segregation is far worse than it was even before the civil rights act.

The act explicitly cites this problem yet completely failed to address it.

Some acts can have obvious no-debate reenactment. But this deters broad sweeping legislation from being passed, if subsets are not well thought out or are pigeonholed in. Why not pin sections onto acts so you can easily repeat ones with strong data/political support, while ending other less effective parts?

That said, there should no doubt be a dichotomy between human rights and constitutional limitations (which are pre-emptive limitations on legislation) and the general type of policies passed by congress.

My primary focus is on economy law as well. Social law might be more socially evolutionary.

I used to think this was a great idea, but now I'm pretty convinced it would never work.

Imagine the equivalent of constant miniature government shutdowns every time a law expired and congress couldn't come to a consensus.

Think about how much pork and other dubious unrelated provisions get attached to bills now. Now imagine what would happen if politicians got a regular opportunity to hold the continuing existence of every single law currently on the books hostage, no matter how important, as a tactic for getting their way on other things they wanted.

While I don't disagree, I feel compelled to point out that in the same book he also introduces the idea of shoving people out of an airlock for being rude to you.

You would also need to define the metrics you are going to be using to measure success at the time you pass the legislation. You would also need some sort of control to measure against, and some way to discourage gaming the metric.

Yes! Another thing you could do is including the reasoning for a law, and have the review address that.

Like-- let's take on Oregon's statute banning self-pumping. Most of the reasons are safety related: https://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/480.315

It'd be cool to have a system where a private citizen would be allowed to file a lawsuit if they thought the justifications didn't have evidence. So the case would look at the justifications, and if the state couldn't prove that self-pumping wasn't more dangerous, the case would immediately remove the law.

One justification for banning self-pumping gas is that it's a jobs program. Except that that reason was never included in the original policy. So under my "challenge the law" framework, that couldn't be used as a defense, unless the Oregon legislature actually amended it.

For the better part of 2 centuries, the legislative histories at the state and federal levels have included the justifications for the law, and the discussions wherein the evaluate different provisions. They keep these in different legislative records because they're significantly more voluminous than the laws themselves.

Personally I think that 1) is not attainable in a practical sense. It would require resources that are not available and would just add to the ridiculous overhead of running a government.

I used to believe in an ideal state as the one you describe. More recently, I think about what a system - i.e economic, political, social - that is stable (in some sense) looks like. For example, liberatarians believe that markets sort things out on their own. I usually conclude that small societies are optimal for quality of living.

> I usually conclude that small societies are optimal for quality of living.

I came to the same conclusion. Sadly many 'libertarians' often gets dismissed as disliking all forms of government and regulation, which is not the case, rather preferring a limited one. But I guess intentional/unintentional misrepresentation is a savvy and common political tactic because it's effective.

My question to you is how do you achieve a limited/small government (without a revolution)? I believe controls like this are one way to achieve it. Much like how the strict policies of the Constitution (or Bill of Rights) have limited/stopped potentially hundreds of thousands of overreaching policies in the US alone over the last two centuries.

The constitution, aka strict pre-emptive limitations, are good. But I believe post-defacto limitations and reviews are also a necessity. Because as I said, some policy does seem rational at the time - which then becomes out-of-date or a bad idea with retrospect.

We currently have no good tools to deal with those outcomes...

I think that you can't, PERIOD. Catalonia was attempting to have a small local government and got shut down. Also, revolutions don't benefit the masses, only a different small group of people. The american revolution displaced the english royalty with new american power. The rebels become the new establishment.

I think the only way to guarantee that you don't government overreach is not have a sociaety where all member are active and responsible. Not in that they all vote. In that they all deal with issues in their community, rather than pawning it off to the government and also giving them the power they need.

I think that society that takes care of itself - instead of inventing institutions to do so - is feasable, but a real pain in the ass to maintain. And it's just easier to not. Sorry if i ranted a bit.

I thought it was a rich part of Spain didn't want to subsidize the poorer bits - like say the south east of the UK wanted to dump the poor parts of the north.

If the opposition is boycotting the referendum its sort of obvious the promoters of the referendum and a hidden objective

You can't fix political bias with more political bias.

The central problem isn't rent control, it's the fact that property is a very privileged asset class that allows owners to extract rent from those with less political and economic power.

Rent control is like pushing down on a balloon that's inflating. The inflation keeps happening whether you like it or not. The best you can do is minimise the effects in selected locations.

That doesn't mean rent control is causing the problems. The underlying problem is the inflation, and you can't make it go away with palliative measures.

In the US, you can't make it go away at all, because the economic system has been designed to privilege rent-seeking - at various levels of obviousness and abstraction - over other kinds of activity.

Rents in the Bay Area and the financial biases and traditions of VC and startup culture are both manifestations of the same underlying problem.

They are, however, suboptimal for defending against conquest by larger societies, which historically has been a more important metric.

Small societies also mean small markets. That's one of the reasons why so few of the largest and most successful companies were founded in small countries; you need a certain critical mass to allow for growth and economies of scale.

Which is often the positive effects of restrictions on bureaucracy, such as timeframes and review agencies, creating limits on the size of government directly and indirectly.

The current costs of never-ending legislation and regulation is incredibly underrated IMO:

https://imgur.com/a/zagcH (please excuse the non-log axis, but the point remains)

Pretty much the only limit on the scope and extent of legislation is the constitution, which affect a limited scope of the interests of society. We must as a society demand that the legislation being enacted is demonstrably effective and useful, beyond the era it was enacted.

1) a well-staffed multi-partisan agency entirely dedicated to reviewing policy, with a mandate of removing any policy having a net-detrimental effect on society. By launching scientific studies of the effects with subpoena power over other agencies, making policy recommendations, and potentially the power to temporarily suspend regulations until reviewed by congress.

I know this sounds like a good idea. It almost sounds like a good idea to me. But I don't think it will have the effects that you imagine.

Bureaucracies are always understaffed. That's because reality is always more complicated than they can model, so the task of rationalizing things so they can be apportioned, assessed, allotted, regulated or taxed can never end. If you put your plan into practice the immediate effect will be a need for a lot more bureaucrats. Before they just had the real world to worry about; but now, they will have to worry about reality plus an ongoing audit of the regulatory environment. And if they make stupid, unaccountable decisions, as bureaucrats sometimes do, some of them will involve stupidly and unaccountably repealing regulation that was serving a useful purpose. I'd be willing to bet that the problems caused when good law ceases to apply are worse than when bad laws are applied for too long.

I think it is flawed at an even more fundamental level: what does “multi-partisan” mean, and how do you achieve it?

It seems like the term was used simply to mean “fair and not favoring any particular political agenda,” but that is a huge hand-wave. Who decides the members of this agency? If we had a good method to establish this fair agency, we could just use that method to establish the entire government.

This proposal just pushes the entire problem of governance back one step. I see this a lot in discussions about improving government: proposing some oversight committee to keep the government (which we all agree has flaws and biases) in check. Even the entire idea of checks and balances between branches of government is based on this concept, and is flawed for the same reasons (although that’s a bigger discussion). If you can make the oversight committee fair and efficient and effective, just do that for the whole government!

Prop 13 was a pretty good temporary measure. But after passing a permanent solution should have been put in place.

Housing prices in California increased a crapload in the years before prop 13 was enacted. Real people with good jobs in new, modest houses they recently bought - not just granny in her 50 year old home - were in danger of being driven from their homes due to increases in property taxes.

> Prop 13 was a pretty good temporary measure.

No, it wasn't.

> Housing prices in California increased a crapload in the years before prop 13 was enacted. Real people with good jobs in modest houses they recently bought - not just granny in her 50 year old home - were in danger of being driven from their homes due to increases in property taxes.

It would be very easy to address that problem with a much smaller policy change than Prop 13. For one thing, the described problem doesn't justify any alteration to non-residential property taxes.

All of those things happen in different contexts. Usually these bodies discover that things are complicated.

These studies already are commissioned by the state. The problem is when they are ignored, like with ballot initiatives that implement rent control and tax control over the objections of nearly every working economist.