Posted on 08/04/2024 8:02:51 AM PDT by karpov
‘He wouldn’t have needed a license if it were an iguana,” Justice Neil Gorsuch says. That sounds like a punch line, but “he” in this story is Marty Hahne, a Missouri magician. “It,” the non-iguana, is Mr. Hahne’s live rabbit. As a magical prop, the bunny is a classic, and probably more easygoing than a big lizard would be about getting yanked out of a hat for shrieking children.
Justice Gorsuch, seated at a coffee table in his Supreme Court chambers, is narrating an anecdote from his book that goes on sale Tuesday, “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law,” co-written with his former clerk Janie Nitze. It’s 2005, and Mr. Hahne is doing a show at a library. “Somebody in the audience comes up to him,” as Justice Gorsuch tells it, “and says, ‘Do you have a license for that?’ He says ‘I need a license for the rabbit?’ ‘I’m from the USDA. You betcha you need a license.’ ”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture had oversight of zoos and other animal exhibitors. “The agency had promulgated regulations that extended even to backyard birthday parties,” Justice Gorsuch says. For the magician, it meant undergoing home inspections and drafting a disaster-response plan. These rules not only didn’t apply to iguanas, they didn’t cover rabbits raised for meat. “You’re telling me I can kill the rabbit right in front of you,” Mr. Hahne once recalled asking an inspector, “but I can’t take it across the street to the birthday party?”
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
The Laffer Curve of Economic Law of the Wealth of Nations brought about by the Free Market Economy.
There, fixed it.
I understand the Laffer curve and I’ve skimmed the article, but I don’t see how the Laffer curve applies.
Maybe something like: ‘the proliferation of laws (and regulations) above a certain point decreases the application of justice rather than makes the society more just’
After a while, too many laws produce diminishing returns and make a society miserable and unable to function, just like the Laffer curve for taxes.
He got to thinking about this while noticing that “good people trying to do the right thing, and not trying to hurt anybody, are just all of a sudden getting whacked.”
later
Some level of regulation is good, but too much is counterproductive?
To he11 with busybodies. Ignore them and do what you want.
It’s a good point and analogy to use the Laffer Curve for regulations.
There is a curve to regulation that goes un-discussed. The downward slope of the curve is when regulators attack eeeeevil CEOs running lemonade stands in your neighborhood.
8 year old CEOs, you know, who don’t have business licenses for their stand. As such, evil 8 year olds with lemon stands need to immediately be shut down or face fines and be run out of town before the penal code gets used against them.
The regulatory regime is ultra ridiculous.
Agreed. There can be too much as well as too little law, too much or insufficient regulation. So, it’s implied that there might be an optimum.
Economics is full of optimums. It’s not just the Laffer curve. Also, the Laffer curve referred to something specific: income tax rates and income tax revenue. Law and regulation refer to any number of things.
The title stems from Kyle Peterson, WSJ, not Neil Gorsuch. I don’t think it went well with the article.j
Too few laws and you get anarchy like in Pakistan. Too many laws, and you get the US and Canada in the 21st century. We had a good balance for most of the 20th century.
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