Sean Lynch seanl at literati.org
Mon Sep 26 11:35:09 PDT 2016


On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 11:20 AM, Xer0Dynamite <dreamingforward at 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.
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