[sam0x17]

You're merely documenting how current regulations are inefficient at catching current abuses. With proper regulations, these kind of abuses could be mostly prevented. With anti-regulation sentiment permeating government and politics right now, this becomes much, much more difficult. People will use the failure of antiquated regulations that need to be updated as justification for removing or kneecapping them, because "clearly they don't work anyway".

All systems trend towards chaos eventually. The answer is always more or better regulation. Sometimes better means more, sometimes better means "take these 50 regulations, get rid of them, and replace them with one simple one that gives you better outcomes". We don't want a rulebook so large no one could ever read all of it (we already have that). We don't want the complexity of the regulations to spiral out of control along with the system -- regulations need to be adapted over time to handle the current (and near future) complexity of the system. And we don't want no regulations -- then the system itself will spiral out of control.

The whole idea of legal precedents works against this too -- the logic is inverted --- instead of constantly coming up with new takes and new rules to govern old and current situations, we hark back to a decision someone made 50 years ago and we say "this is set in stone", when we should be constantly updating and modifying those precedents to better fit the current state of the system. Eventually new laws get passed, but the judicial system itself is largely a damper on progress in this regard, dragging us into the past and making changes that could take 5 years take 50 years. We see this reflected in our astounding incarceration rate, and a number of other areas.

The pace of technological and societal evolution has grown to be much faster than the pace at which we upgrade our regulations. We are speeding towards a brick wall.

[voakbasda]

Anti-regulation != anti-government. I am okay with regulation and being regulated, but I absolutely am not okay with any of our existing governments having any part of that process. Revolution does not require anarchy as an outcome; indeed, my preference simply would be to install better governance.

Turning the law into a set of constantly shift sands would make it impossible to do business, because that could end up rivaling anarchy. Risks can be taken only when the consequences can be predicted in advance. Without precedents, every single legal case would turn into a gamble. Only fools and the insane would ever stick their necks out; not far from where we are now, I suppose.

[BitwiseFool]

I've been reading about the philosophy of Law, and how other cultures deal with legal codes. One of the most intriguing takeaways was critically examining our own system and just how verbose it is. American (and just about all Western Legal Codes) are extremely detailed and contain tons of clauses that are explicitly enumerated.

Whereas an older society might have a law as simple as "Do not break into other people's houses", we will have dozens of codes defining what constitutes breaking and entering, determining what kind of property was being broken into, the scale of theft, whether or not there was intent, and more. And, there are sentencing differences depending on what kind of tools the burglar was carrying, if at all. To me, now that I've seen how other cultures handle law, this is complexity overkill.

We don't seem to be comfortable with "common sense" laws because they are considered too vague. But the alternative is a really dense legal code you have to be professionally trained to understand, and one that is so complicated that offenders can avoid prosecution based on dozens of technicalities.

[antognini]

One thing I've been thinking about lately is that human behavior is inherently complicated and because legal systems need to account for human behavior there's no getting around the introduction of complexity into the system. There's just a question of where that complexity lives.

Here in the US, we have three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. One way we could deal with complexity is at the legislative level by writing extremely specific laws. So in your example the legal code expressly spells out in detail what constitutes breaking and entering, exceptions, etc.

Another way to deal with that complexity would be for the legislative branch to write a fairly broad set of laws and grant the executive branch power to write detailed regulations. So from that you end up with administrative agencies that write very detailed regulations, which, while not quite "laws" (since they weren't written by the legislature), nevertheless function in a similar way.

A third way would be at the judicial level. If the laws are fairly broad and there is no specific regulations, then edge cases end up in court and judges make the decision. So over time there ends up being a large body of case law that handles all the edge cases (or at least, all the edge cases that have been explored so far).

So there's really no way around it. You can put your complexity in the legal code itself, in administrative rule making, or case law, or some combination of all three. There are probably advantages and disadvantages to the different choices, but I don't think simplicity is an option.

[sam0x17]

Right, but society has accelerated. 50 and 100 year precedents used to make sense. Now it seems like they need to be updated at least every 10 years, because that's how long it takes for society to fundamentally change at the current rate of progress.

Regarding government, if you don't like your current government, then if you think hard about it, what you really want is either 1) additional regulations or restructurings that prevent the government from having the bad traits it currently has, or 2) the removal of existing regulations that are preventing the government from being better in your eyes.

If your statement is "I don't like the current state of the government" then you are simply for transforming it into something you do like. This can be done through a regulatory framework.

If you don't trust the government as it is, then you are one more voter for regulating X, Y and Z such that you do trust the government.

[SuoDuanDao]

There is also a cultural element though. The laws and regulations may encourage corrupt behaviour, but if there was a strong cultural expectation that the most upstanding people go into government to serve their communities - and if that were actually who was attracted to the role - that wouldn't matter all that much.

[visarga]

Voting is a blunt tool. It destroys too much nuance and freedom of choice.

[sam0x17]

Agreed. We should revise that process through new regulations and modifications to the existing system.

[tjr225]

> Risks can be taken only when the consequences can be predicted in advance.

That sounds like the opposite of a risk to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk

[AnimalMuppet]

Risks can only be intelligently taken when the odds of the different outcomes are at least approximately known in advance.

[JanisL]

I'm trying to encourage a discussion about what money itself should be. I think without this discussion it will be very hard to make effective regulations around money and the implications this has on the operations of the banking system. Once people are more informed about these topics better regulation will be possible. Frankly I don't see people talk about the fundamentals of money much, the current monetary system is convenient enough for most people such that they don't have to think about the details of how it works in their day to day lives.

[sam0x17]

What money is in what sense though? In a centralized/decentralized sense? In a philosophical sense? Are we considering going back to bartering?

My point is, you see companies abusing bailouts and say "oh no, our fundamental concept of money is changing because bailouts". I see that same situation and say "oh no, our regulations are so antiquated that they are 50 years behind in terms of the abuses they are able to prevent, we need to update our regulations and create new ones, and create a framework for rapidly adjusting regulations going forward, because the current rate is untenable."

This problem extends well beyond money and touches every area of society. Society and technology are evolving faster than the legal frameworks that supposedly govern them. Limiting the scope of the discussion to just cover money would do just that, limit the scope of what should be a much wider discussion.

[nine_k]

> take these 50 regulations, get rid of them, and replace them with one simple one that gives you better outcomes

But this is exactly the "we need fewer regulations" approach, implemented sanely.

[webmaven]

> But this is exactly the "we need fewer regulations" approach, implemented sanely.

The problem is that people conflate "fewer regulations" with "less regulation".

We certainly need fewer regulations (there are too many and they are too complex). But we need more regulation (too much falls outside of the current regulations' scope).

Both aspects of the status quo seem to be a result of regulatory capture by concentrations of capital and power.

[sam0x17]

Specifically, we need more regulatory coverage coming from a fewer number of regulations. That is the guiding star. More restrictions, more elegant / simpler rules / fewer actual rules.

[BeFlatXIII]

It’s always refreshing to see a fellow skeptic of legal precedent in the wild. The precedent set by making the just ruling in one specific case may set up far greater injustices in the future.