Quote:
Originally Posted by tshiggins
QFT. During my seven years as a legislative reporter, I pretty much determined that at least 80 percent of all the laws passed addressed stupid, thoughtless things done by "regular people" that caused demonstrable harm to others.
About 15 percent of the total were designed to give a small group some sort of regulatory advantage over others -- this was what Bill refers to as "regulatory capture," and it was a real thing.
Maybe five percent of the laws were actually forward-thinking and progressive enough to qualify as "good for everyone." These were the ones that qualified as good investments of public funds, protections for civil liberties, and such.
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At least when I look at California referenda, there seems to be a fourth category: Laws reflective of moral biases against other people's behavior. I'm thinking, for example, of a law that passed in California a few years ago against selling horses to be slaughtered for human consumption. Now, on one hand, this doesn't make it illegal to sell horses for consumption by animals of other species, as pet food for example; on another, it doesn't do anything to ensure that people who own aging horses can afford to maintain them. So it's purely intended to stop people from buying horsemeat because other people think eating horses is icky. I don't know what percentage of laws can be attributed to puritanism, but it's surely not zero.