| Governments like the one described in this article remind me of a massive monolithic PHP program where all the functionality is lumped into a single blob of spaghetti code. Ugh. The negative impact of government regulations like this are proved by reducing the size of a company to one. Example: if you start a business, and hire yourself as the first employee, should you be forced to give yourself 3 years off for maternity leave? Of course you could never do this. It would kill your business instantly. Just like the Unix philosophy of writing programs that do one thing and do it well. Society functions better when we have many smaller social institutions with focused roles. Government doesn't need to do everything. There are plenty of other social constructs that have proven more capable of providing many of society's needs. Governments should stick to the task of protecting individual liberty. Businesses should stick to the task of providing quality and innovative goods and services. Family, community, churches and private charity should stick to the task of taking care of those less fortunate. We as programmers and developers can help improve society by demanding that (like our small but beautiful software), social institutions stick to singular responsibilities to which they are most suited. |