According to this Cato video of Molly Gill the temptation to regulate at the federal level is too easy, thereby leaving us with a plethora of useless overlapping laws. For example car jacking is a federal crime. Most states never got around to making it a state crime since murder, abduction, assault, auto theft and a myriad of other felonies in every state's criminal code pretty well cover car jacking as a crime without need of another statute. It got enacted after a particularly egregious assault in Detroit drew enough publicity so that Congress enacted a Federal Law in 1992 to solve the problem.
Really? According to Gill it is currently impossible to catalogue the laws currently on the books and they are impossible to find since they are so thoroughly scattered over a century's worth of Congressional records. I would like to see a Grover Norquist type pledge developed for legislators, which I call the Pac Man pledge; where for every law enacted ten are eliminated. I wouldn't mind a politician making a pack with the devil just as long as he eliminates ten laws. If such a pledge were in force it would take decades before we got to a lean and workable criminal and civil code.
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