Irreducible Intentional Complexity

In an earlier post, titled Irreducible Complexity, I theorized that the size of some recent bills being passed through congress was a deliberate attempt to keep people from reading them.

Eric at Classical Values goes one step further, pointing out that it’s not just the size; the text itself is a barrier to understanding:

As there is no way to read that kind of garbage without looking up other laws and other paragraphs in other kinds of garbage, reading it is pretty much a waste of time.

It’s almost as if they’ve come up with something which was never designed to be read, except later by the salaried bureaucrats who wrote it — and whose job it will be to enforce it. The latter write the laws, and politicians who vote to enact these laws are not really making the law in the sense that the Constitution requires; they are doing as they are told.

Emphasis mine.

In my opinion, any law that cannot be summarized into one or two pages using language that a sixth grade civics student^[a] can understand should never be proposed, much less passed. I would fully support a law (or, if necessary to make it really official, a Constitutional Amendment) requiring that a.) any law passed by Congress must be attached to a summary that fits the description I just used, and b.) any law found to fundamentally contradict said summary would immediately be null and void^[b]. Unfortunately, that’d be hard to pull off, I think.

However, we have to stop letting our legislators get away with claiming that they “didn’t know” that certain clauses were in the bills for which they voted. Soldiers following orders they know to be blatantly illegal aren’t excused; why should Congressmen be excused from passing evil laws just because “they didn’t know”? That’s especially true when the entire point of having a representative republic is that the elected officials should have both the time and the ability to read, understand, and deliberate on the laws they are passing. If the Founding Fathers had wanted deliberately ignorant people voting directly on the law of the land, they would’ve simply created a democracy!

I find it easier to swallow that the people of Massachusetts would re-elect Ted Kennedy after Chappaquiddick than that anyone would vote for someone like John Conyers, who admitted that it was no good for congressmen to read the bills unless they had two days to read it and lawyers standing by to explain it to them. (Granted, Conyers hasn’t been up for re-election since then, so maybe no one will vote for him.)

I’m a big fan of Dave Ramsey and one of the things he says, over and over and over is that you should never put your money into something you don’t fully understand. Congressmen shouldn’t put their support behind something they don’t fully understand, and for them to do so is to fail to do their jobs.

1. That is, a literate sixth grade civics student. Given the state of our educational system, I don’t think that goes without saying, sadly. [↩]
2. Additionally, it’d be nice if we could throw language in there saying that any Congressman who voted for a law so nullified would be ineligible for re-election in the next cycle. [↩]

…when the people telling me that there is start acting like it. ($550,000,000 edition)

McKAY: I think it’s highly unlikely. Besides, geo-engineering’s a dumb pursuit anyways. I mean, no one person’s gonna solve global warming. We all have to do our part.

KELLER: Like not take private jets.

McKAY: Well, they were going our way anyway.

There’s been a bit of an uproar over the fact that the House has budgeted $550,000,000 to buy private jets for Congress.

I’d like to say I’m surprised by the hypocrisy involved in Congress’s working on legislation intended to combat Global Warming while wasting $550,000,000 to buy private jets, but nothing about corrupt government officials (I repeat myself…) spending money on things they’d like to have while doing their best to keep the common citizen from having any money (or freedom) to buy things for himself surprises me anymore, sadly.

Why does Congress have its own fleet of private jets? In theory, congresspeople could just as easily travel using commercial aircraft on their own dime, rather than passing the cost off to the taxpayers for private jets that just add more pollution to the air.

Perhaps a better question is, why do we still send Congresspeople to DC? Wouldn’t they be able to better serve their constituents if they stayed at home, where they could actually meet with the common citizen?

Sure, they have to meet and discuss bills and such, but we have technology that could handle that much cheaper than the cost of sending them all to DC to meet. It could work much like Xbox Live’s 1 vs. 100, and the resulting virtual Congress could be broadcast on C-Span just as easily as the current one is. I bet it would get more viewers, too – Congressman Big Daddy (I-Rapture) would almost certainly be more fun to watch during a long-winded speech than, well, pretty much anyone else.

This would have quite a few advantages. Taxpayers could save money on travel expenses for our legislators. Travelling legislators would not be contributing to pollution. Common citizens could meet with representatives (and senators) more easily, and lobbyists wouldn’t find their jobs quite as easy. Both of those last two would contribute to making our representatives actually, you know, represent their constituents.