At 12:00 AM 07/31/2001 -0700, Alan wrote:
I guess we *do* have the best government money can buy. We just were not the ones writing the checks...
Naahhh... You ought to be able to buy a much better government than that. :-) That actually is part of the problem - governments writing laws about things they don't really understand. It's most obvious in high-tech areas, but even something as potentially simple as the tax code confuses them, because there are thousands of pages of special cases designed mostly independently to attempt to achieve various social goals or help various special interests, too many for anyone to keep track of when trying to band-aid the code to achieve the next social or political objective. And the special interests who are successful in getting them to do things generally aren't much more competent about it, and the unexpected consequences may or may not help them.