[AnthonyMouse]

The argument is that getting rid of the bad laws is better than enforcing them more rigorously. This can be applied to the laws propping up the taxi medallion cartels as well as the ones prohibiting personal drug use. Then anyone (not just Uber) could compete with them and thereby disband the taxi cartels previously using those laws to constrain competition.

[opello]

I agree that removing bad laws is good. I think by introducing the second, culturally charged topic (1.) taxi cartels, 2.) recreational drugs) you diminish the possible interpretations of your perspective.

The other downstream conclusions make sense too, but the linkage is more opaque making it difficult to appreciate.

Also hard to acknowledge is--who decides which laws are "bad"? Generally, societal outcomes should test the efficacy (toward some comparably abstract societal good) of laws, which then prompts the legislature to do something between patting themselves on the back and authoring actually effective law.

[AnthonyMouse]

> who decides which laws are "bad"?

It's better to ask the question in a different way. We know what bad laws are. They're laws that benefit some interest group at the expense of the general public, e.g. by constraining competition or diverting tax dollars to cronies.

So the question is, how do you eliminate bad laws? This isn't a question of what a hypothetical legislature should do if it was full of good faith actors, it's a question of how to structurally align the incentives of a real legislature with the interests of the general public so that they're inhibited from passing bad laws.

[opello]

That makes sense but seems like it would only actually be a subset of bad laws. I mainly mean to highlight that it's not a comprehensive way to identify bad law.

> how to structurally align the incentives of a real legislature with the interests of the general public

This seems like a critical nuance that, like you said, needs a structural solution. I have no actual idea, but conceptually this seems like it would eliminate a subset of particularly bad laws and actions (e.g. members of the legislature trading on their insider information) which have outsized, negative outcomes for the public. But we also rely on that very rule making body to essentially self-govern. And such a grass-roots movement of reforms to put the public first seem unlikely given the attitudes and sensationalizing behaviors present in the members of that body.

I avoid politics because of just how disaffecting it is to think about most of these details.