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Comment by realce | Hacker News Reader

Legislating would collapse under the simple iterative maintenance of such a policy. Every year would be N+(this year's new legislation).

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I don't think the set of laws should be growing boundlessly year after year. Another idea is to adapt the house cleaning rule: to pass a new law, you must first get rid of an old law.

Why put such arbitrary restrictions on our elected lawmakers?

Reducing regulatory complexity is a worthwhile goal, but that's a bad way of going about it.

Just imagine: the day after the new search feature goes live, the product manager comes to you and asks where the user profiles have gone. You say, "oh, I removed them - I think it's a good idea to remove an existing feature after adding a new one! Complexity, after all, is bad!"

If you try to show all the icon bars in Office at the same time, you'll end up with half of your screen buried under them. There are diminishing returns.

Replace "laws" with "features" or "lines of code" in your comment. Read it again. How much sense does it make?

My friend, I don't think that's the epic airtight gotcha that you think it is…

You did not explain why, though. So I must remain here in my belief that my argument makes clear sense.

Hint: this is a feature for people proposing this sort of thing. They want legislating to be pared down to where nothing is regulated, and the only crimes are property crimes.

Everyone else just likes stability, knowing that the law tomorrow will mostly be the same as the law today.

Perhaps society doesn't need an ever linearly-increasing body of laws?

Life today is immensely more complex than it was in the past, and you need to pass new laws (and amend the older ones) to keep up with it.

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