Down The Sewer Pipe – Politically Speaking

One of the first lesions that an elected office holder learns is, there are more laws on the books than are enforced.  Every year the Congress of the Untied Sates of America passes thousands of laws. Add to this the hundreds of laws passed by the fifty States, the half of a hundred laws passed by each county, and the tens of laws passed by each town. The amount of laws nationally easily reaches half a million. The question is; how many laws do the, local, county, township, State, or Federal government need?

There are reasons for laws, and then there are reasons to have laws that assist the police in catching bad people.  Think about this a bit though, and then explain to your constituents, just why does your community need so many laws.  This will be hard to do if the conditions that created the law in the first place have ceases to exist.  Like herding sheep down the main street of town, or keeping a mule in a hotel room.  While we laugh now, there were valid reasons when these sorts of laws were created.

The challenge, at least to me, in creating laws is to find if there is a law on the books already.  If the State or Federal government has a law that address the issue then see if they will enforce their own laws.  If there is a law that you have that almost addresses the issue, make some changes.  If no one has such a law, create a new one, and then get an old never enforced law off the books.

If you remove a law that is out of date, every time you create a new law, your community will actually think that you are making their life better.  Rather like cleaning up a very old house and removing the cobwebs.

Sherman