Thursday, January 29, 2009
How Modern Law Makes Us Powerless - WSJ.com
I think this is one of those articles that gets to the core of a problem.
I also think it's much more than just the President's problem.
My analogy is that unions often cripple companies with too many rules. Perhaps you see the similarity...
I also think it's much more than just the President's problem.
My analogy is that unions often cripple companies with too many rules. Perhaps you see the similarity...
Philip K. Howard explains in his Wall Street Journal article:
"Freedom has a formal structure. It has two components:
1) Law sets boundaries that proscribe what we must do or can't do -- you must not steal, you must pay taxes.
2) Those same legal boundaries protect an open field of free choice in all other matters.
The forgotten idea is the second component -- that law must affirmatively define an area free from legal interference. Law must provide 'frontiers, not artificially drawn,' as philosopher Isaiah Berlin put it, 'within which men should be inviolable.'
This idea has been lost to our age. When advancing the cause of freedom, law today is all proscription and no protection. There are no boundaries, just a moving mudbank comprised of accumulating bureaucracy and whatever claims people unilaterally choose to assert. People wade through law all day long. Any disagreement in the workplace, any accident, any incidental touching of a child, any sick person who gets sicker, any bad grade in school -- you name it. Law has poured into daily life."
