Read the bill

“They get up and say, ‘Read the bill.’ What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?” (Congressman John Conyers on the Affordable Healthcare Act)

A 2,700-page law is not a “law” by any civilized understanding of the term. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is 2,700 pages, there’s no equality: Instead, there’s a hierarchy of privilege micro-regulated by an unelected, unaccountable, unconstrained, unknown, and unnumbered bureaucracy. It’s not just that the legislators who legislate it don’t know what’s in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can never hope to understand it, but that even the nation’s most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension. A 2,700-page law is, by definition, an affront to self-government.(MS,3/31/12)

"Stop Being Stupid."

How many of our problems could be solved by applying this simple admonition? I would say the vast majority of them. My career in the law has been a prime example of what results from ignoring this rule. All sorts of puerile idiocy is tolerated in the law and in the justice system. The result, predictably enough, is an idiotic system that is so choked with nonsense that it barely works. Similarly, in the broader society, we are strangling ourselves, committing suicide, with the manner and variety of stupidity that we tolerate and even encourage. It doesn't have to be this way. It is not necessary. It is one of the by-products of liberalism run rampant. So stop being stupid. Don't listen to stupid, don't tolerate stupid, don't indulge stupid. We cannot afford to be stupid anymore.