Texas state politics/law is completely f'd in so many ways, but one thing they do that I think is fantastic, and I wish all states did, was have a "Sunset Review Commission", https://www.sunset.texas.gov/how-sunset-works.
Basically, all agencies that are authorized by the legislature are set to automatically be abolished in (usually) 12 years. Once the expiration date is near, the Sunset Commission reviews the agency and recommends whether to reauthorize it, in which case the legislature must pass a law to reauthorize, but the "default" is that the agency expires.
This really helps fight the natural tendency of lots of these professional agencies to grow to protect their own power, regardless of their original purpose. And even if agencies are normally always renewed, the review process itself is really useful to, when necessary, smack these agencies upside the head to get them back to their original goal. One example I'm familiar with, a couple years ago the Sunset Commission basically tore the Texas Veterinary Board a new one after they decided to go after animal shelter vets for trying to save animals with extremely limited resources, https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/One-third-of... - actual report at https://www.sunset.texas.gov/public/uploads/files/reports/St...
I wonder what would happen if we did this with laws. There are so many laws that get passed that are literally no longer applicable (funding to build a bridge in the US is done as a law), but also I wonder if this would engage everyone a bit more in how the country runs.
"It may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law.... Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, & not of right"
- Thomas Jefferson to James Madison in 1789, expressing feelings on why laws should automatically expire
So when people talk about the founding fathers and what they had in mind when they wrote the constitution, typically in relation to gun laws, it should also be pointed out that the constitution should have run out after 19 years?
I actually quite like this. The US constitution has been elevated to some quasi religious document where everyone interprets it how they want to interpret it. A bi decadal debate on what it should actually say would be useful. Although it would take politicians longer than that to actually agree.
I feel you are commingling negative rights with regulations .
The constitution provided "negative" rights to the people and individual states.
Negative rights are rights that exist unless someone acts to negate them.
This means the constitution affirms that people and states get to keep all priviledges, unless specifically enumerated as priviledges of the federal government.
So, if the Federal government starts with nothing, the right end state for the for the government to end with nothing.
This is quite different from the inertia you see today in Federal government regulatory growth.
Going back to the current discussion, negative rights dont lapse since they define the starting point. It is only regulations (I.e. anything that comes outside of the constitution) which is subject to reset.
Jefferson is speaking there of a political-philosophical hypothesis. It's not a statement of fact that laws do, or that the Constitution does, expire after 19 years. Clearly they don't by default.
By all means, let's hold a constitutional convention periodically. Whether it's every 20 years or every 100, we're overdue. The founders even foresaw the potential need for that, and provided a procedure utilizing constitutional conventions to bypass state legislatures, a procedure which the country has not once utilized.
Failure to go through the amendment procedure doesn't grant us the right to ignore the Constitution as written. It's very easy to say you don't like some part of the Constitution. It's very difficult to propose and pass an alternative.
In addition, we could really use a mechanism for the judiciary to declare a law or amendment ambiguous. The legislature gets locked in and catered meals from a random local public school until the judiciary is happy that the new law isn't ambiguous. Apart from DC having the best school lunches in the country, we would also see less vitriolic polarizing arguments. The federal legislature should decide at what point a developing fetus or child gets what rights, and how those should be weighed against the rights of the mother to be free. Because human rights both to life and liberty are a federal thing. And the whether the 2nd amendment is ambiguous due to changes in language or intentional due to disagreement even back then, the judiciary could say "clean this thing up and come back when you have a supermajority, hope you like canned green beans".
What counts as a militia, what does it mean to be well regulated, to what degree does the security of a free state matter, what counts as an arm, what actions counts as bearing them, and what infringes the right to do so?
The amendment is clearly written, but ambiguously worded.
It's not at all clearly written. As written it's simply ungrammatical: the comma after "militia" is a syntax error.
Such nitpicking would ordinarily be unimportant, but given that the purpose of the entire prefatory clause is unclear, it completely undercuts any notion that the entire thing is "one of the more clear written" (as the GP said). It makes it impossible to tell whether it's intended to be a limitation or an explanation (which none of the other amendments have or require).
As you say, many of the words are also ambiguous. But for a piece of law whose interpretation is a matter of tens of thousands of deaths per year, one would expect it to at least be grammatically valid.
How does one person think they know more than the group of people involved in writing it? Your ego is quite strong.
There are no gramatical errors in 2A or any right. None of the terms used are ambiguously defined, try using a legal dictionary instead of saying they’re ambiguous because you don’t understand them.
Militia has a legal definition, as does arms. Bearing them seems clear to me, ability to use them.
Free states are not free to ignore any right enumerated, so that’s a no brainer, same with the loss of rights.
If 2A is ambiguously worded because we want it to define it’s own terms instead of using the standard legal definitions, then what does this make every other right?
It seems to me that it’s being defined ambiguous as an attempt to pick it apart.
There's no such thing as the standard legal definition, most terms, including these, have multiple definitions. Does a militia refer to the organization that is the militia, or does it refer to its members, or to its potential members. At the time of the ratification of the second amendment, the militia was limited to able bodied males over 17, were we supposed to update this to include women as our cultural values shifted or stick with the original definition? For arms, were they going with the definition of any item useable for offense or defense, or were they using the definition of an item a person arms themselves with? Did they mean every weapon of the era, or every weapon that could ever be invented? Is a machine gun an arm? A grenade launcher? A cruise missile? A pipe bomb? A nuke? Does bearing mean the ability to use weapons, or is it the ability to possess weapons, or is it to carry the weapons physically on your person, or is it the more general state of taking up arms, or is it the right to serve in the military? If you are free to use guns but there are restrictions on transferring ownership, has your right to bear arms been infringed? How about if there are no restrictions on gun purchases but there areas where you're not allowed to bring guns, like public buildings? If a school is built in such a way that it is impractical for me to wheel a black powder canon into it, has that infringed my right? Is a noise ordinance that effectively means I can't fire my gun for target practice in my backyard at 2am an infringement?
It's turtles all the way down.
It doesn't matter that you think it means one thing, it's ambiguous because someone else can find a different meaning which to them is equally clear, using different but equally sensible definitions, and there is no way to determine objectively which interpretation is correct.
Most clauses in the constitution are ambiguously worded. This is intentional. The constitution was supposed to be the foundation of America's legal system, not its capstone. The founders easily could have made every amendment a 500 page document detailing exactly and unambiguously what they meant. They instead went with short and concise clauses that would guide future legislation while leaving plenty of room for future leaders to make decisions.
> There's no such thing as the standard legal definition, most terms, including these, have multiple definitions.
That is just blatantly false. Most terms get their legal definitions from case law, or other laws. They are purposefully clear to avoid ambiguity when arguing cases.
> Does a militia refer to the organization that is the militia, or does it refer to its members, or to its potential members. At the time of the ratification of the second amendment, the militia was limited to able bodied males over 17, were we supposed to update this to include women as our cultural values shifted or stick with the original definition?
> For arms, were they going with the definition of any item useable for offense or defense, or were they using the definition of an item a person arms themselves with? Did they mean every weapon of the era, or every weapon that could ever be invented? Is a machine gun an arm? A grenade launcher? A cruise missile? A pipe bomb? A nuke?
Literally all of these are arms, and with the exception of a nuclear bomb, all are legal to own by civilians with proper licensing. (It still amazes me how many pro gun control people think explosives and automatic weapons are illegal.)
You'll notice they drop the "fire" part from 2A and use the generic term "arm", which means yes they intended civilian ownership of all arms encompassing explosives as well.
> Does bearing mean the ability to use weapons, or is it the ability to possess weapons, or is it to carry the weapons physically on your person, or is it the more general state of taking up arms, or is it the right to serve in the military? Is a noise ordinance that effectively means I can't fire my gun for target practice in my backyard at 2am an infringement?
The right says "keep and bear arms", which makes it clear that you can both have them, and use them. Bear is a pretty standard word and is used elsewhere (like in finance) and the legal definition is also quite clear: https://dictionary.findlaw.com/definition/bear.html
Where you get the idea of it's a right to serve in the military is a rather interesting thought.
> If you are free to use guns but there are restrictions on transferring ownership, has your right to bear arms been infringed?
No, how could it be? Restricting transfers does not keep you from owning and using them. If restricting transfers from an FFL dealer to the end customer is what you mean then yes (read you can't buy guns because you've made them impossible to purchase), you absolutely can.
> How about if there are no restrictions on gun purchases but there areas where you're not allowed to bring guns, like public buildings?
Courts are deciding this now, and the first case up after the new guidelines says only federal property. If the local government makes use so complicated as there are no places you can legally carry, then it is a violation of the second amendment. So yes, complicating usage is a violation.
> If a school is built in such a way that it is impractical for me to wheel a black powder canon into it, has that infringed my right?
> Is a noise ordinance that effectively means I can't fire my gun for target practice in my backyard at 2am an infringement?
Now you're getting ridiculous and I won't answer these.
> It doesn't matter that you think it means one thing, it's ambiguous because someone else can find a different meaning which to them is equally clear, using different but equally sensible definitions, and there is no way to determine objectively which interpretation is correct.
If this is how legal terms were decided, on what someone meant or what they thought the term means, then all cases would be chaos.
> Most clauses in the constitution are ambiguously worded. This is intentional. The constitution was supposed to be the foundation of America's legal system, not its capstone. The founders easily could have made every amendment a 500 page document detailing exactly and unambiguously what they meant. They instead went with short and concise clauses that would guide future legislation while leaving plenty of room for future leaders to make decisions.
Or, they removed a lot of the room for future leaders to remove rights they thought were important, because they came from a country with a pseudo-dictator and wanted the people to have a means to escape.
Essentially you've proven me right. You have used some veil of ambiguity to state a particular right is ambiguous, then proceeded to give various scenarios of a gun controllers wish list to hinder this right. You're claiming it's ambiguous so you can pick it apart. The wording is quite clear, people can own and use guns. It only becomes unclear when people want to remove the right.
Keep in mind that Thomas Jefferson had no part in writing the Constitution (he was in France) and was a significant opponent of it. People like Alexander Hamilton thought that not only should the Constitution be permanent, but that it should also provide for an elected king.
As a sibling explains, it's important to understand the ground state. The ground state assumption is that citizens have all these rights (speech, arms, religion, etc). Narrowing or abrogating these rights is where laws come in.
The opposition at the time to the Bill of Rights was that it would confuse people into thinking the rights came out of the constitution instead of from nature.
Jefferson was certainly of the mind that documents like the Constitution needed to be overhauled about once or twice a generation.
People like to talk about "the founding fathers" as if they were of a singular mind about things. But they were very much not. They were so much not that the Vice President of the United States literally shot the former Secretary of Treasury over various disagreements.
So, you know, they weren't exactly 100% with each other.
>"It may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law.... Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, & not of right" - Thomas Jefferson to James Madison in 1789, expressing feelings on why laws should automatically expire
IMHO that should also apply to land ownership rights which should also expire after some time. How can we say with a straight face that granting people, institutions or corporate entities rights to own a piece of the Planet Earth in perpetuity, forever, is fair or a good thing that is sustainable? It might have sounded good 300-500 years ago when new land was constantly discovered (cough conquered/taken cough) but what happens when the land pie runs out? Do we just say "tough shit mate, you should have been born 50 years ago when land was still available and affordable for everyone, or you should have been born in a family with inherited land ownership"?
It's a hot take but I think land should be only leased for a limited time, like the max lifespan of a person, ~100 years or so, and then expire, never owned in perpetuity by any individual or corporation.
What you're saying, however, is that the government owns the land in perpetuity, and only lets you live there. That sounds familiar and oddly like serfdom.
The USA has 1.9 billion acres. Developed urban areas account for only 3.5% of this area. If you count other, non-urban areas with more than 30 people per square mile, then the occupation of habitable land constitutes less than 6%.
Accounting for mountains and bodies of water, Earth has 24,642,757 square miles or 15.77 billion acres (43%) of habitable land. Humanity is only 1/100th of the total biomass on this planet.
Less than 15% of earth is either an urban area or occupied for agricultural use. And 95% of the world’s population is concentrated in just 10% of the land.
Land is generally affordable. Land in areas not yet fully developed is actually quite inexpensive. You can pick up 40 acres of land in Montana for $20,000 USD, and they'll even throw in some livestock and feed.
Property in developed population centers increase in price because of scarcity and market conditions. That's the product of living in an area that has recursive development, amenities, limited supply, and practically unlimited demand.
This leads to an inevitable conclusion. We have plenty of land and plenty of resources. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell something. With this in mind, you could double the population of the planet and still not use a third of the habitable land. As it turns out, Earth is really, really big.
I’ve seen some properties like this. What they didn’t tell you is there is no road access, you’re surrounded by gov land (and they want your plot to finish the set), and you generally won’t be able to access the land without an easement. That’s why the cattle are still there, they can’t get a truck in there to move them.
That sounds great until you spend 5 minutes thinking about it...
What do you do with the $500k home sitting on the $80k land that just got repossessed?
Why would anyone take care of their 98 year old land if they know it's gonna disappear in a few years? Are you gonna fine every person that goes right up against the line (regarding environmental laws for example) without crossing the line? By the time you get to the expired land, it will be a defacto landfill.
Can people choose to lease a specific plot of land and if so does the term reset to 100? Why not pass property around the family back and forth forever?
Who sets the price of a lease? Use gov't prices and the deadweight loss kills your economy. Use market prices and every lease will cost about the same as buying land in our existing system.
All of this has already been thought about. In Amsterdam, for example, you don't own the ground that your home is on; you lease it from the city. Extending that lease is automatic, but technically, eventually everything reverts back to the city. And if you still need it, you lease it from the city again, for whatever the city now thinks the land is worth. That way the city continues to benefit from private development of the city.
I don't know. I'm not familiar with Georgism. It's called "erfpacht" in Dutch, and it's an old practice. Amsterdam is the only city I'm aware of that does it on this scale, but it's not unheard of elsewhere.
Google translation of the Dutch wikipedia page for "erfpacht" [1] translates it as "Ground lease" and suggests it is used in various countries including the Netherlands, about which there's a large section. I don't know how well the translation is w/r/t technical terms, but it reads ok to me.
Is this like ground rent in the UK for leasehold property? This is a thing but usually a fairly insignificant cost as long as you keep renewing it with decades to spare.
UK ground rent goes to the private owner of the land though, which is mostly not the state. That's why there was a scandal recently when some landowners tried to impose a ground rent that doubled every X years - which the government has thankfully banned now.
The UK has leaseholds, which do run out. Typically it means the value of a property drops as a lease gets short, and so you're incentivised to pay to extend the lease to remove the uncertainty.
> That sounds great until you spend 5 minutes thinking about it...
You and I don't have to think about this for five minutes as that's too little time and we're not qualified, but I'm sure if we round up all the top economists and university graduates of the G20 countries and put them together in a luxury resort in the alps to brain storm for a few months, I'm sure they'll be able to come up with a better economic land lease model than the system we have now which only encourages multi generational, winner-takes-all, land hoarding scheme for rent seeking purposes, where the earliest who got in the market got a great deal which they can use as leverage to acquire more land over time, and the ones getting into the market now are completely priced out and screwed as the pie is fixed in size and has already been called dibs on.
Basically, we need a system that resets the monopoly board from time to time as currently you're entering the game from square one while others inherited a better starting position with more assets to boot.
I'm sure such a system could be designed if desired but that's not what's desired as the elites and people in power with entrenched wealth don't want to lose their position on the board.
Maybe the land value taxes are (intentionally) too low for the super rich who own lots of land?
Maybe we need a differential land tax system that's very low taxes for small areas intended for personal living(shelter), and taxes that go up progressively the more land you own, especially if you use it to rent-seek. It should discourage land hoarding and feudalistic rent seeking.
@benj111 That was just an example off the top of my head. Obviously more qualified people than me can come with a sensible model that accounts for farms and other land used by businesses who need it. My main idea was to discourage rent seeking not farms and other businesses who contribute to society.
What is the definition of too much land? If I save up for my entire life making $100k a year across the family and buy 100acres should the gov be able to tax me off that land?
People have spent more than 5 minutes thinking about it. There's a 2018 book called Radical Markets[1] that explores alternative models for various entranced economic systems, such as property ownership, voting etc. There's a free podcast interview with the author online[2].
The tl;dr is that you'd decide what your $500k home is worth. You could choose to say it's worth $80k, $500k etc. You'd then pay property tax as a function of what you decided it's worth.
The catch is that you'd be obligated to sell it at the price you selected if a buyer showed up.
In economics lingo one thing you can optimize for is "investment efficiency", or "allocation efficiency". Traditional land ownership is the canonical example of the former, someone else might be able to make better use of your land ("allocation efficiency"), but they don't own it, so tough luck.
Turning all "land ownership" into what's basically a mandatory bidding system is a way of maximizing allocation efficiency, you'd optimize for (re)allocating land to someone who can most efficiently use it.
The authors spend a lot of time discussing the various edge cases, and in particular the normal knee-jerk responses someone might have.
In particular you can set a system like this up in such a way that a "mandatory buyout" would be a fantastic deal for a given homeowner, e.g. the equivalent of having someone offer you $1 million for your $500k house.
To me my house is worth a lot more than it is to the market because to me it has an emotional value. A mandatory buyout assumes that people do not have emotional bonds with their homes. Do you suggest one adjusts their estimate of the value twice, or thrice as high to prevent a mandatory buyout? How is that fair to those people?
You also end up taxing actual value that can only be used by one person. If your house is close to your job or your parents, or if your children or if your children have gone to school the previous 5 years in the neighborhood and don't want to leave their friends, you'd be willing to pay more to keep it. Now, you actually have to pay more to keep it.
We shouldn't be taxing people on the fact that their house is near their job. And if they don't raise the price of their house, someone will eventually buy it at the market value of the house, and the value will simply have been destroyed.
It also sounds like a great way to harass people. Don't like your new black neighbor? Just force him out by buying his house for the tax price. Ideally he'll have a little more money than he started with, but I could see other social institutions, like trouble obtaining another loan, preventing the re-homing of "undesirables".
I think you and others in this thread are missing that the proposed mandatory bidding price is a multiple of the "real" value.
So yeah, don't like your new neighbors who just bought a $500k home next to you, you can give them $1.5m (or whatever) to get their house. How are they now worse off exactly?
That family can then probably buy the larger house next to yours for $1m, and have $500k in cash left over. A bank that was willing to give them a loan for a $500k house is less likely to do so when they've got an extra $1m in cash?
The system the authors proposed is mainly intended as a clean way to get rid of things like eminent domain and the holdout problem. Most real estate transactions would take place between "willing" sellers and buyers, just like they do now.
>I think you and others in this thread are missing that the proposed mandatory bidding price is a multiple of the "real" value.
That doesn't work. People will set the "real" value to be lower than the real value, in order to reduce their taxes, but high enough that someone who wants to buy the house has to pay barely enough, after multiplying, to make it worthwhile to sell. The tax rates will then be raised accordingly and we'll just have "the mandatory bidding price is the real value" with extra steps.
Right now we don't live in a world where such a bidding system exists, because it's a rather obscure (but interesting) idea. Even if people were widely aware of the details the political will to implement it probably doesn't exist.
But you seem to be arguing that if such a system were implemented the very structure of it would lead to a race to the bottom?
I don't see why that would be the case, if there's political reluctance to implement such a system to avoid certain outcomes, why wouldn't there be the same reluctance to raise the relevant taxes?
In any case, the book I cited upthread doesn't argue for some sort of "shock therapy" introduction of a system like this, but e.g. starting with commercial real estate.
Even people who'd argue that they should never have to sell their ancestral family home would probably find it hard to extent that argument to their neighbourhood Starbucks never having to accept a bid from a competing coffee company.
You could’ve left the color of the skin of the neighbor out and still made your point. People of all skin colors face discrimination these days, not just blacks.
I am curious why you called this out. Is there a social reason I should not use such specific examples in the future? In my mind, giving a concrete example that the reader has some familiarity with help them to develop the story in their mind.
For example, one could misinterpret the neighbor as having the same socio-economic status, making it far less clear how losing the house but gaining an equitable amount of money causes hardship. And blacks specifically have been targeted by such policies in the past, so it's a lot easier to imagine how other social policies align to make becoming un-housed even more problematic for that neighbor.
You're just focusing on the downside without considering the upside.
Maybe you want to go see a movie you've been dying to see tomorrow, and you've got your $100 tickets in hand.
But there's someone else in the same situation, but they'd really like to see it. If a market exists they could offer you $1000, and you'd both be happier, as you can now afford something you'd prefer more than the $100 activity.
The same goes for real estate, it's just a less liquid market currently.
You're assuming that emotional value cleanly maps to current real estate ownership. What if you'd like to re-purchase a house your family lost in the last recession, but which your family had been living in for generations?
The status quo effectively leaves you without a recourse if the current owner isn't willing to sell, the system noted upthread assumes that emotional bonds to real estate can be priced.
> Surely each offer round becomes a bidding round, rather than a simple purchase.
No:
1. There's no requirement to list the house - who would even know if you sold it twice a year?
2. There's no requirement that the seller has to take the highest offer. The other bidder will have to bid again next year when taxes are due.[1]
[1] You can't set the tax based on what the bid is, because the bidder may not have the money (or may not be granted the bond) when time comes to actually do the transfer. The tax has to be based on what the actual selling price is.
How would it? The emotional connection comes from the memories made in that home. You’re still raising kids, still growing up in these homes. So my guess is no.
> The catch is that you'd be obligated to sell it at the price you selected if a buyer showed up.
A modification to that I read somewhere which I like is the buyer has to put in a cash over the barrel offer. Completely unencumbered cash for a period too long for any leveraged investor to tolerate. And enforcing that "cash"'ness is the courts will not enforce claims upon the property based upon pledging it as collateral for say, 2X median population lifespan years.
I'd also want to see a natural person exception and a bounty. If you are a natural person (non-corporate entity, real human), then your home is exempted from the bidding system. But if someone figures out a natural person individual claimed two or more properties under the exemption for some period (say a year and a day) or longer, then that someone gets their choice of properties illegally claimed under the exemption, with instant eviction enforced by the state immediately after the court-supported decision.
The intent of the modification is to disallow hacking the bidding system by tapping credit markets far beyond the reach of median homeowners and systematically outbidding them.
If your nightmare scenario is that credit markets are going to offer you your arbitrary asking price for your house I'd like to live in your nightmares :)
In Israel, for example, a lot of land is not "sold", but leased by the state to people. In practical terms, there is no real difference.
Technically speaking, the lease terms are 49 / 98 years. The problem is that when you reach the end of the lease, there is no real possibility of _not_ extending the lease.
And the lease is for the _land_, not anything on top of that.
So it "sounds" nice, but in practical terms, it just adds another body that you have to go through.
From economic perspective, there is very little difference between the two. A bank will give you a mortgage to buy a house whose "land lease" expire next year, for example. Because there is no possibility of that not being extended.
There is _slight_ advantage to buying houses not leased, but mostly because that means somewhat less paperwork to go through.
That’s essentially how things work in the US with property tax. If a landowner fails to pay property tax for some extended period, eventually the government will seize the property and auction it off to fulfill the tax debt.
Some states allow the person/org who failed to pay the taxes on time to "redeem" the debt (pay it off). So this means that for several years after you acquire the property, there is a risk that it will revert to the previous owner.
Some tax auctions are only for the right to collect the tax. In those states, you never can acquire ownership. You just get a lien.
And some tax auctions are for worthless strips of land. I've seen some that were essentially the strip of grass between a parking lot and the street. The shopping mall had a permanent easement to put a driveway through that grass (if they wanted) and there was no possible way to make ownership of that 10 foot wide (and several hundred feet long) strip of lawn to be useful. Plus, you get to pay property taxes for something you can't live on.
> IMHO that should also apply to land ownership rights which should also expire after some time.
Why limit ownership restrictions to land ownership only?
Private ownership of property (not limited to land) is foundational for functioning democracies; some would even go as far as saying it's foundational for society.
Those societies that went your route of "from each according to his abilities to each according to his need" turned out very badly.
Where I live we have a "right to roam" over other peoples land as long as we behave sensibly and follow some simple restrictions - seems to work perfectly well.
If I'm understanding correctly you're implying that we can have the concept of individual land ownership, whilst not restricting general access of said land, yes?
This is all fine and very nice when it comes to your ability to take a leisurely stroll in the countryside, but it is only such a small facet of the actual issue at hand: Land being hoarded and/or not being developed to the most of it's potential utility. This is one of the reasons why a city like San Francisco has thousands of homeless people and almost no high density housing.
You need both. Freedom to roam in Scandinavia goes much further than the right to a stroll, and includes e.g. foraging and camping, but you're right it doesn't solve the issue of ownership.
To me the freedom to roam is more valuable as an example of how property rights the way they are elsewhere is a huge infringement on liberty in that it massively restricts the general public to the benefit of individual owners.
Once you've experienced it, it is hard not to feel walled in and unfree when you move somewhere without that right.
As such, it is reasonable to discuss which other aspects of property rights ought to be curtailed if one wants to maximise liberty for all.
"Once you've experienced it, it is hard not to feel walled in and unfree when you move somewhere without that right."
I completely agree, I was referring to Scotland where the Right to Roam was introduced relatively recently - I suspect to counterbalance the existing historical land ownership position which is very complex and opaque.
I think you're right that codifying what had previously existed as a de facto but no de jure right certainly was a direct response to increasing pressure from landowners to limit access.
Norway was in a similar situation in that until the 1950's the right was implicit - the one major area of law which was not codified because it was seen as so self-evident that it wasn't considered necessary (Sweden, in contrast, has it embedded in its constitution) - until pressure from land owners who increasingly started blocking off land in ways which violated of centuries of tradition made it clear it needed to be codified so it could be defended in court.
It's seen as integral enough to Norwegian culture that it's taught in primary school.
> Land being hoarded and/or not being developed to the most of it's potential utility. This is why a city like San Francisco has thousands of homeless people and almost no high density housing.
I think you'd need to cite why this is the sole explanation for the scale of SF's homeless population.
> Land being hoarded and/or not being developed to the most of it's potential utility
Land value taxes (in the Georgist/Geoist manner) will ensure that a very valuable parcel of land, such as the one in the middle of San Francisco, will not have a low-value improvement such as a parking lot or a single-story dwelling on top of it.
Too bad that the actual policy we have instead is stuff like Prop 13 and rent control, which all but assures that such higher-value development will not happen.
Land is different from other forms of property and capital. Its supply is almost completely inelastic, and it derives the largest proportion of its value from the efforts of others.
They are an elastic resource. The amount being created is responsive to demand.
Also, they're substitutable; if people can't afford classic cars, they'll buy art, or wine, or yachts, or Rolexes, or a thousand other luxury goods. Land is only imperfectly substitutable, and it substitution has definite economic costs.
Yes, I should have mentioned land value taxes. Depending on the level, they reduce or eliminate the property interest in the rental value of the land itself, while preserving the usufruct and stewardship aspects, crucially allowing the owner to take full property ownership of and benefit from the improvements they make to the land.
Which societies have tried your quoted route? The only communist countries I know about never made it to communist but were very early in the process taken over by dictators who very much took more than their need and certainly inhibited the sharing of abilities.
You're right though, inheritance taxes on all assets help to iron out such issues; but in general the ruling classes avoid most taxes (and often laws in general) and aren't keen to enforce their application.
> Which societies have tried your quoted route? The only communist countries I know about never made it to communist but were very early in the process taken over by dictators who very much took more than their need and certainly inhibited the sharing of abilities.
That's just a different way of saying that it isn't practical. Consider Communism as a goal. Communism is a goal that is often attempted but is never achieved.
When no one can implement something in practice, it's the something that's the problem, not the people.
> You're right though, inheritance taxes on all assets help to iron out such issues; but in general the ruling classes avoid most taxes (and often laws in general) and aren't keen to enforce their application.
Firstly, it's ridiculously easy to dodge inheritance taxes if you're rich.
Secondly, going down the path of "if you, personally, didn't earn something, we will confiscate it from you" historically never worked out well.
You misunderstood, I wasn't advocating for communism but our current system is definitely flawed and unsustainable long term.
So you're telling me that we should allow people to own pieces of the planet earth forever? Sorry, but how is that sustainable? How is it fair the someone gets to own large swaths of the planet and use it as leverage to buy even more of it, just because his great granddad came to an empty country and got land basically for free which now make his grandchildren millionaire landlords even though they didn't contribute to society in any way to earn what they have and if they were to buy their property at current market rate they wouldn't be able to afford even 10% of it.
This may have been the foundation of societies, thousands or hundreds of years ago, but what was the population of the earth back then and what is it now? This system is not sustainable, and just like laws, it should be updated to account for current conditions.
Our current system is flawed as it just comes around full circle to creating a society of a few landlords owning most of the property and assets and the peasantry which can't afford to own anything. And looking back on history we know how that usually ends. We need a new system that resets the monopoly board fairly instead of waiting for social uprisings to boil due to increased wealth inequality.
> So you're telling me that we should allow people to own pieces of the planet earth forever?
Which country allows this? All "land-owners" pay land taxes, and if you stop paying "your" land will be confiscated.
> just because his great granddad came to an empty country and got land basically for free which now make his grandchildren millionaire landlords even though they didn't contribute to society in any way to earn what they have
And now we're back to the argument "to each according to his need". Until/unless you are willing to ruthlessly enforce that nobody gets anything unless they, personally, earn it, there will be large numbers of people who will have stuff that they did not earn.
Arguments along the lines of "to each according to his need" are broken, almost by design.
> We need a new system that resets the monopoly board fairly instead of waiting for social uprisings to boil due to increased wealth inequality.
IIRC, the last time I checked, the countries with the least wealth inequality were those with the strongest private ownership laws.
If it's wealth inequality you're targetting, then strong economies help. Countries with restrictions on ownership mostly, with some outliers, fare poorly on wealth inequality.
> How is it fair the someone gets to own large swaths of the planet
No person owns large swathes of our planet.
> I wasn't advocating for communism
Hard to know where else commenters are going if they're saying the government should be allowed to seize property from people it defines as "people who deserve to have their property seized".
> This system is not sustainable, and just like laws, it should be updated to account for current conditions.
A large factor in current conditions is the constriction of supply by regulation. Trying to socially engineer cities has vote-winning, short term positive consequences (rent control means your rent doesn't change! Hooray!) and predictable but overlooked non-short term enormous negative consequences (it's not worth landlords' time to upkeep properties! It's only worth building luxury apartments!)
Before we say "the government should just come in and take property in the name of redistribution, the way they did in the USSR", perhaps we should consider some alternatives. Saying "there's a problem; here's a solution; if you disagree with my solution than you are saying there's no problem" is a syllogism as old as time.
I never said the people should have their property seized like in comunism and that the government should redistribute it. But i can't endorse the current system either. Surely a better system can be designed if we put smart people up to it, no?
What's your solution? All you did was call me and everyone who thinks the current system is wrong, a commie.
>A large factor in current conditions is the constriction of supply by regulation.
Yes, which is why we're in this mess. It's a rigged system masquerading as the free market. Those who own property have vested interest in increasing the value of what they own and use it as leverage to buy more, at the expense of those who don't own and wish to buy in.
> What's your solution? All you did was call me and everyone who thinks the current system is wrong, a commie.
No. I didn't do that, and I didn't only do that.
> It's a rigged system masquerading as the free market. Those who own property have vested interest in increasing the value of what they own and use it as leverage to buy more, at the expense of those who don't own and wish to buy in.
It is nowhere near a free market, and I don't believe it pretends to be.
> What's your solution?
My personal solution is to do the following:
Realise that most people have property because their parents or grandparents worked hard and sacrificed for years or decades or their whole lives to give a transformationally different life to their descendents.
This can't happen overnight or via regulation.
Take a hard look at the long term effects of policies that are short-term vote winners. The state intervening more in housing should be the last resort, not the first.
Undermine envy by remembering that most families with wealth lose it within 3 generations, and that many people move into the top 1% of earners during their lifetimes, if only for while.
I don't know if that would work for anyone else, though.
>The state intervening more in housing should be the last resort, not the first.
Agree that too much gov regulations push prices up, but like it or not, the gov intervention is a necessary evil for quality housing that has infrastructure and won't fall on you after 10 years. Where I'm from in Eastern Europe housing is affordable due to the lack of gov regulations as developers go crazy and just build anything everywhere but those buildings while nice looking and modern, have no good infrastructure anywhere near them as neither the developers nor the government wants to spend money on it. So you get apartment buildings with no paved roads or parking lots, no schools, no kindergartens, no doctors, no bus stops, no parks or green spaces. Awful. Gov regulation could fix this but also make buildings more expensive for the developers and for the end buyers. In the end you can't just leave everything to the "free market".
>Realise that most people have property because their parents or grandparents worked hard and sacrificed for years or decades or their whole lives
Or, they got lucky to be born in a time when real estate, even in now red hot metro areas, was far cheaper for the average worker/family, as was getting education and a stable career and raising a family.
Saying hard work and sacrifice is the key ingredient to getting rich is massive survivorship bias and young people have wised up to this fact.
>Undermine envy by remembering that most families with wealth lose it within 3 generations, and that many people move into the top 1% of earners during their lifetimes, if only for while.
That's so untrue for Western Europe where the wealthiest families go back hundreds of years, and due to high taxes and low skilled wages you can't really move to the top 1%.
In Austria, the country's top 100 richest people own a third of the wealth in the entire country, and during the covid pandemic, the gap between them and everyone else got even wider while they got richer and everyone else poorer. One city already voted a communist mayor into power. Their wealth goes back centuries and hasn't been lost in 3 generations and will survive 3 more generations.
It's hard to debate without citations. Here are two things:
> Saying hard work and sacrifice is the key ingredient to getting rich
I didn't say it's the key to getting rich. I said they worked extremely hard (no holidays / long hours of hard jobs / making sure their kids prioritised school and working hard) to ensure their descendents could afford something. Not get rich. Afford something.
> is massive survivorship bias
I'm not saying that these things guarantee a home. They're just the most likely path to getting one.
If you're more left wing, you probably view the state as a parent who can be trusted to confiscate and dole things out fairly.
If you're right wing you probably view the state as a necessary evil for providing specific services that can't be provided fairly purely through people making agreements with each other.
If you're the former, you may well think that the state seizing property in the name of redistribution will solve more problems than it causes. If you're the latter, it's the other way round.
> IMHO that should also apply to land ownership rights which should also expire after some time. How can we say with a straight face that granting people, institutions or corporate entities rights to own a piece of the Planet Earth in perpetuity, forever, is fair or a good thing that is sustainable?
Who's granting people perpetual ownership of a piece of land? Once you stop paying taxes on it, the state will take it back.
> but I think land should be only leased for a limited time, like the max lifespan of a person, ~100 years or so, and then expire, never owned in perpetuity by any individual or corporation.
I mean in a practical sense this is exactly what happens. You die -> taxes are no longer paid on the land -> someone else gets it. That "someone else" is either an heir who is now paying tax on it, or its sold to someone else entirely.
China has something like this (when you “buy” property you’re actually getting a 70 year lease from the government) and I can tell you that it’s a huge problem (no one wants to pay again for property they already paid for)
As has been pointed out leases are a thing and work just fine, but many of the objectives you're after could better be achieved through a land value tax. Most of the value of a piece of land is usually derived from it's location relative to other facilities and infrastructure that were not created by the land owner, so it seems reasonable to return a share of that 'excess' value to the public purse.
Do I camp outside Microsoft headquarters then walk in on day 1 of year 101 and say, “this is mine now”?
Where I live we have leasehold land so titles theoretically extinguish after 99 years. What has happened in practise is that the lease just auto-renews, making the situation no different to freehold apart from the paperwork.
> Do I camp outside Microsoft headquarters then walk in on day 1 of year 101 and say, “this is mine now”?
You'd probably have to outbid Microsoft for it. I don't think land should ever be free for the taking for whoever claims it first; It should belong to society and you purchase use rights from society.
There is no "society", though. Who actually owns it and decides? The state? A local body? Who do you give all the power over the land to, if you're removing its ownership from individuals?
The state owns the land and will lease it to any individual, with the price being determined by the free market, same how property prices are determined today. Whoever can afford the most, gets it.
Best of both worlds. You discourage real estate speculative and hoarding for rent seeking purposes and still have the free market competition determining the prices.
Once your lease is up you can renew it at current market prices if you want it and can afford it. If not, then you make way for someone else to take up the lease.
I don't know why you'd want a system where a rich person can take the land your house is on if they can pay £1 more than you for it every so often, unless you're a fan of the feudal system.
I also don't see how it discourages speculative investment. If nothing you own is really yours for very long then you're much more likely to have your property bought from under you if it's in a desirable area. As an investor I would want to do that if I believe I could rent it out at a profit.
A modest proposal: Do land rights the way Nature intends, i.e. one's territory is that which one can physically defend against incursion by conspecifics. Social groups are okay. Acceptable tool use will have to be determined by the courts.
Auto-expiry of laws is an interesting idea, and one that gets floated here on HN with some regularity (possibly because it appeals to the refactoring mindset?)
I wonder about "Chesterton's Fence" effects, though - maybe we'd have to make a _lot_ more use of the "institutional memory" of the non-political parts of government. Behind every law, there's usually at least some advisory recommendations / reports from various agencies, and over 10-30 year timescales there's a non-zero chance that some of the original authors of those are still around.
Otherwise, we'd run the "junior developer" risk of perpetually refactoring laws without understanding the reasoning behind them, and breaking functionality users depend on in the process. Sure, it's obvious that some blue law about not pasturing your cow on ye towne grasse on ye Holye Sundaye is outdated, but I suspect those obvious deprecation cases are few and far between. Thoughtful, context-aware refactoring applies to systems in general, not just computer systems.
Sounds nice in theory, but after decades of everything running smoothly, people forget just how instrumental certain laws were to ensure that stability.
It's a lot like anti-vaxers, anti-pasteurization, and other anti-science fads. And I can point to the repeal of banking regs like Glass-Steagall which resulted in the ~2007 financial crisis and recession. Including a post-it note on a law isn't going to give future people the same perspective as someone who lived through the issues first-hand. If that worked, we wouldn't have voters repeatedly supporting politicians who make the same insane promises that never work.
Alternatively, the renewal of the EPA or the FTC or the FDA would be filibustered and agencies would stop existing, leading to rivers catching on fire and snake oil salesmen using deceptive ads.
I don't see the problem here. If the society is so fractured that they can't agree on having agencies to protect against burning rivers and the like, then the society shouldn't have those agencies.
that's a nice consistent sentiment, but not necessarily useful
if there's consensus then bad laws can be changed, or good ones extended, or the filibuster removed, etc. so why have them auto-expire anyway? (see the Patriot act, got extended without much fuss.)
it would make hiring people to these agencies uniquely challenging, and it wouldn't solve much of anything. (it's a typical libertarian-ish idea, without the usual props required to make these workable, eg. a society that favors cooperation, prefers to adapt their life to meet their goals, eg. like-minded folks moving en masse to make their own life much better, and also getting out of the way of others, instead of what usually happens, which is local groups fighting tooth and nail against any change that would inconvenience them)
>if there's consensus then bad laws can be changed, or good ones extended, or the filibuster removed, etc. so why have them auto-expire anyway?
The auto-expire thing is a good idea; it's basically automatic garbage collecting. It's a procedure which forces the legislature to review every old law to see if it needs updating or renewal or not. Many laws are old and forgotten, because the legislature isn't forced (by its own auto-expire procedure) to review these old laws, and then they eventually cause problems because some lawyer digs them up and applies them to a case.
The Patriot Act got extended without fuss because it had lots of bipartisan support. You may disagree with the Act, but almost all the congresspeople liked it (and they were elected or re-elected by the voters), so it's correct that it was extended.
If the EPA doesn't enjoy that level of support, or even enough support for Congress to re-authorize it every so often, then it should be abolished. Sure, that will result in disaster (burning rivers and the like), but if that's what the People want, that's what they should get, unless you think the government should be replaced with an authoritarian system.
You may think the EPA and environmental protection is important, but you share a country with a huge number of uneducated morons who don't, and their vote is just as valid as yours.
> The Patriot Act got extended without fuss because it had lots of bipartisan support
It wasn’t bipartisan. Witness what happened when Max Cleland - a senator who loss three limbs in Vietnam - was accused of being “unpatriotic” for not supporting the Iraq War
That’s not quite accurate. Specific provisions from the original act, fewer each time, were extended.
> It contains many sunset provisions beginning December 31, 2005, approximately four years after its passage. Before the sunset date, an extension was passed for four years which kept most of the law intact. In May 2011, President Barack Obama signed the PATRIOT Sunset Extensions Act of 2011, which extended three provisions.[3] These provisions were modified and extended until 2019 by the USA Freedom Act, passed in 2015.[4] In 2020, efforts to extend the provisions were not passed by the House of Representatives, and as such, the law has expired.[5]
If Congress cannot pass laws to deal with current problems because of gridlock and the filibuster, you think putting more items on their plate will help?
But the FDA just issued new rules around PFAS this year and tens of billions were allocated to upgrade water plants to prevent contamination in that omnibus spending bill that just passed. Why do you ask?
> you think putting more items on their plate will help
Not GP, but I think it would stress the system to the breaking point and force us to fix it. I strongly suspect this would actually be a good thing. If a periodic process is painful for an organization in many cases doing it more frequently will result in the problems being fixed.
There is clearly significant disagreement in the US over the desirable scope of federal powers. Forcing that issue to a head would hopefully result in a more functional system in the end.
That might be a good idea. But I’m not sure your example is a good one.
Repealing a budget law only adds paperwork and cost and complexity. It’s not like these kinds laws have an ongoing cost.
I wonder if one issue is just perception: people often see laws as “ongoing rules” when they can often just be, “on this date congress agreed to these terms and conditions for some thing.”
usually they are unceremoniously reauthorized by Congress because its just too much to think about
sometimes Congress forgets (or the related lobbyist forgot/couldnt get a lunch date with the co-sponsor)
but this isn't a perfect system its just more case load in practice that no individual person is aware of
I personally cant think of any debate that occurred on an upcoming sunset provision where people consciously said “yeah that has no more applicability let it expire” or “we have to reauthorize this or itll be a disaster” its just nobody has time to think about it so they rubber stamp it in the annual budget reconciliation bill to keep the government open
the previous sitting President made an Executive Order that for every new regulation passed, "at least two" must be repealed. but then everyone kind of ignored it, because it's an Executive Order. would be nice to have something like that but for real though. the best commits are ones where you delete more lines than you add...
completely befitting the idiot he is. mr sharpie guy. he would be the first to game his own rule.
just pick two random ones, copypaste into the new one, repeal the old ones, and enact the new one. yaay. procedurally, formally, technically correct!
> the best commits are ones where you delete more lines than you add...
then you end up with trivial perfection, nothing
whereas the real life zen is accepting imperfections, and still working to decrease them, to converge on some better goal.
sure, law is web 0.1, it would be good to refactor it, but the main problems are not the number of laws. just as you can't (oughtn't?) measure code by lines, you can't do with laws.
arguably many narrow laws might be even better than a few super vague ones, etc
He also wanted to outlaw immigration from Muslim countries. When he found out that was neither legal nor possible, he zeroed out quotas for worker visas, such as H1 & H2. And also zeroed out quotas of many immigrant visas such as EB1-3. Over 4 years that was about 2 million worker visas that were not issued. The media outrage over the "worker shortage" or "quiet quitting" should instead have been directed at the orange dude who made it impossible to import workers. When things were shut down due to covid, it was hardly noticeable. But now, blame gets flung in all the wrong places.
Then you push back on that.
You don't have to give up, it's not all-or-nothing.
That's sort of the history of the law. You outlaw crime (new types of crime are variations of fraud, deceit, etc) and then people "innovate" their methods to get around that and you outlaw that too. Hopefully suppressing them more than they "innovate". But we don't have to just hope, we historically suppressed these new crimes when it became a big problem.
You dont just give up and let them create and do new types of (yet to be classified) crime just because they will always predictably want to do it anyway.
Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid would no longer exist. Nor would the Clean Water Act or the Clean Air Act. The ACA would have expired two years ago, too.
There are problems with term limits, indeed... but is the alternative really to keep the status quo and have essentially a generation of wealthy gerontocrats in power who are completely disconnected from the reality of life for many of their constituents, not to mention who are fucking over the planet? Politics needs continuous supply of fresh blood, people who grew up with computers and no fossils unable to read e-mails that aren't printed out by aides for them. And of young people who have realized that it is no longer possible to join a company at 16 for an apprenticeship and leave it for pension at 65, or that a single earner can no longer afford a comfortable home.
And while we are at it: We need not just term limits, we especially need age caps for politicians and corporate officials. Reach pension age and you're irrevocably out. Here in Germany, old buffoons at the helm of companies who refuse to use computers are the single worst issue for the German Mittelstand. Companies that can't adapt because the owner is stuck in 1960 mentally will wither and die eventually - and while I don't care about ignorant owners, I do care about the employees and the loss of economic contributions.
So your article claims term limits are bad (didn't say they are a scam) because they increase the power of those who are in it for them long haul. And it will weaken Congress (not sure how you can make the weak Congress weaker) and give more power to the executive branch... You know the branch that has term limits.
Are you saying they wouldn't exist because they wouldn't get reapproved? Because that is what you are implying.
And term limits are definitely not a scam
The more civilised way of doing this is to have an independent commission whose job it is to regularly review the state of the laws on the books and put forward lists of them to be repealed by the legislature.
This works quite well in the UK, for example, where Statute Law (Repeals) Acts have been passed[0] every few years since 1969, with the most recent[1] repealing the whole of 817 Acts of Parliament, and portions of more than 50 others.
I think that's a good system and it is nice it exists, but I sense that expiring something might be a better way.
There's a lot to be said to having people step up to defend something instead of having people attack something bad, or even overlook it out of ignorance.
I also remember one thing trump did I thought was interesting was that adding a new regulation required eliminating 2 existing regulations.
Hey, just by the way, it seems your characterization of the outcome with regards to vets at animal shelters is not correct. It's kind of the opposite. It starts on page 41 of the PDF (second link). The problem was: "Recent court decisions prevent the State Board of Veterinary
Medical Examiners from regulating shelter veterinarians or
veterinary medicine practiced in animal shelters."
"Strictly interpreted, the statutory exemption means anyone who practices
veterinary medicine in the context of animal shelters and rescue groups is exempt
from the Veterinary Licensing Act, including standard of care measures and
use of controlled substances. The impact of the decisions is already having an
effect on the oversight and regulation of veterinary medicine in Texas, as the
agency has begun to close all complaints against shelter veterinarians, declaring
them non-jurisdictional based on the decisions.
Taken to the extreme and assuming the Act does not apply in the context of
shelter medicine, animal shelters and rescue groups would not need to hire
licensed veterinarians. If the Act does not apply to the care of these animals,
any person regardless of training, education, or qualification, and regardless of
their criminal or disciplinary history, would legally be able to practice veterinary
medicine on shelter and rescue animals."
The recommendation from the Sunset Commission was therefore for the legislature to change the law to make sure veterinary medicine at rescue clinics WAS regulated.
Since I'm familiar with the details, here is what happened:
1. Texas Vet Board sued a very well-known shelter vet in Texas to revoke her license. Without getting into too much detail, the crux of it was that they wanted to hold shelter vets, who are all on very limited budgets, to the same standards as private vets. The irony is that, if shelter vets can't meet those standards, the Texas Vet Board is OK with just euthanizing the animals. The irony was brutal: "We want you to be held at a certain standard to protect the animals, but if you can't hit that, just kill them."
2. The vet countersued, saying there is a specific carve out in law for owners to treat their own pets, and legally shelter pets have been relinquished and are owned by the shelter. She won this case.
3. During the Sunset Commission hearings, the panel went hard after the Vet Board, basically saying they were harassing shelter vets for the sole purpose of trying to protect their own power (similar to the "everyone who draws a map needs to be licensed" BS in this post), while meanwhile they had a severe problem with not tracking and handling substance abuse issues by some vets. 3 of the Vet Board members ended up resigning because the Commission basically said "you suck".
4. Now, the situation that remained after the court cases was, as you pointed out, there was no more regulation of shelter vets. I think a lot of folks, including shelter vets, think this is not ideal, but they are very wary of being regulated by a board with very different goals (which are, honestly, protect the fees that vets can charge) from the goals that shelter vets have. So there has been some discussion since then about what level of regulation is right for shelter vets.
FWIW the status quo has remained the same - shelters legally own the animals in their care, and thus, as owners, shelter vets are not regulated by the Vet Board for the care they give their animals.
I only read the quoted text not the source link, but I dont see a reasonable basis for the recommendation inference you are making.
The commission is just stating the facts. I don't think they are advocating any change in law. (again from the quoted text).
The fact remains that state veterinarian boards were going after shelter practitioners, the court then gtanted shelters relief - on the basis of the Act - then the Commission generated the post-mortem on the Act.
There seems to be no recommendation from the quoted text?
The whole thing is just three and a half pages, starting on page 41.
On page 43:
"Recommendations
5.1 Request the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Water, and Rural Affairs and the
House Committee on Agriculture and Livestock to take action to clearly define the
scope and limits of the statutory owner exemption in the Veterinary Licensing Act." It goes on...
I guess out of sight out of mind would apply here. Even if rubber stamped repeatedly maybe it will present an opportunity to catch the eye of some inquisitive type to ask why?
Why should those commissions be abolished? I've heard complaints about them, like I've heard complaints about every single regulating body in existence. but I haven't heard so many that it seems like they should be disbanded.
Aren't those commissions responsible for keeping the power on in Texas [0]? Didn't millions of Texans suffer significant cost, danger, and hardship and >100 Texans froze to death because of these commissions decisions to keep Texas' electrical grid isolated from the eastern and western power grids and to not address infrastructural issues discovered when the exact same problems were experienced in 2011? Weren't a lot of Texans each charged thousands of dollars for a month with very bad electrical service in the recent freeze?
> The reality of that catastrophe has very little to do with politics.
"Politics" means "the activities associated with making decisions in groups." Anything that impacts the lives of groups of people where people made decisions (like the decision to have an isolated electrical grid [0]) is politics.
I live in Chicago. We have far worse ice storms than Texas but we also see over weeks 100F in the summers. We realized that A) power is a critical utility that people need to literally live, and B) it's technologically unnecessary and economically irrational to let inadequate infrastructure cause mass casualty events and cost us $195 BILLION [1] in damage, contamination, and lost economic opportunity, so we made the decision to engineer a resilient power grid and we don't experience the kinds of massive, protracted failures that Texas keeps having, despite the Public Utilities Commission of Texas and the Texas Railroad Commission investigating the failures when Texas' grid went down for the same reasons back in 2011 [2]. By definition, that's politics.
> And those charged high rates agreed to variable pricing.
My power bill each month ranges from $100 to $150 and I just pay for what I consume. People in Texas were getting automatically charged rates as high as $11,000 in a month where they received terrible service. [3] It's just bullshit to say anyone agreed to that.
> The ultimate reason why Texas had a problem was because of a nasty ice storm took out infrastructure.
Why was that infrastructure vulnerable to a nasty ice storm? It is possible to build infrastructure that can easily operate in those conditions.
From what I heard there were plenty of warnings, but EPCOT either refused to demand weather-hardening infrastructure, or did not have the authority to demand this hardening.
Counter-counterpoint: Claims that something is better than the alternative need to be supported with some evidence.
Sunset laws to do not magically improve the quality of the voting public or the quality of the elected representatives--and those are what ultimately decide the quality of the laws.
Furthermore, if we cite Texas, the evidence seems to be a negative correlation rather than a positive one.
(Side note: I'm actually in favor of laws having some form of trigger to cause them to disappear. Time, by itself, is generally insufficient, however. Laws should have a reason for going onto the books and when that reason is invalidated the law should be forced to be reauthorized with a different reason.)
They Sunset Commission themselves are also reviewed [1].
FWIW, the reality is that of course while the system is not perfect, pretty much everything is out in the open and reviewed on a scheduled basis. That really does go a long way to prevent the type of "slow power creep" of a lot of these professional licensing boards.
Basically, all agencies that are authorized by the legislature are set to automatically be abolished in (usually) 12 years. Once the expiration date is near, the Sunset Commission reviews the agency and recommends whether to reauthorize it, in which case the legislature must pass a law to reauthorize, but the "default" is that the agency expires.
This really helps fight the natural tendency of lots of these professional agencies to grow to protect their own power, regardless of their original purpose. And even if agencies are normally always renewed, the review process itself is really useful to, when necessary, smack these agencies upside the head to get them back to their original goal. One example I'm familiar with, a couple years ago the Sunset Commission basically tore the Texas Veterinary Board a new one after they decided to go after animal shelter vets for trying to save animals with extremely limited resources, https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/One-third-of... - actual report at https://www.sunset.texas.gov/public/uploads/files/reports/St...