On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 11:20 AM, Xer0Dynamite <dreamingforward@gmail.com> wrote:
Like Lessig's "Code is Law". LAW is also CODE: it's the Operating System for your Government. Presently: bloated and with a few design flaws. Fortunately, it's Open Source. Muhahhhwhahaaa
This is almost worthy of being called THE "Geek Fallacy." It is why people who seem otherwise smart are so often statists. They love systems and they make the mistake of thinking government is just a machine and that all it needs is better code. But that's totally false. Human organizations are NOT MACHINES, at least nothing nearly so simple as a computer. They are run not by code but by people responding to incentives. If you want to see what their programming is, look not at the laws but at the incentives people are responding to. "Programming" such a beast looks far more like biological evolution than it does like programming a computer. This, by the way, is why our legislation is so complex. You cannot tell the goal of a piece of legislation by reading it. You can watch it in operation and see what happens, and you can try to understand the incentives of the people who wrote it and voted on it, but that's it. For the most part, if a law gets passed and then doesn't get changed, in all probability the intent of the law is precisely what its effect is.