Rules fail

Every few years somebody tries to reform the tax code, or fiddle with immigration laws, or craft some other scheme to make life more fair for people who fell through the cracks under the old system.

And, shortly thereafter, we notice that there’s a new batch of winners and losers, and some new injustices or inequities.

I am more and more convinced that Godel’s theorems have political analogs. No finite set of rules (laws are one type of rules) is going to fix all the problems of a society. Each rule has consequences, and after a while you find yourself adding new ones to fix problems the old ones brought. The number of rules always increases.

Somewhere we get diminishing returns. Some sets of rules let you run a “mostly just” society, that is more or less stable. Adding more rules moves the injustices around, but doesn’t seem to stamp them out. The new set may be marginally better—it will not be right.

And “hard cases make bad law.” Trying to tinker with the structure to save a few can break the structure. Remember how “no fault divorce” was supposed to relieve the suffering of the few people who had to endure horrible marriages, and get the lawyers off everybody’s back? Didn’t work quite the way we expected, did it? I’m not convinced that our society has bottomed out yet from that disaster.

It seems the better part of humility to give up trying to “fix” government after a while. I don’t believe this is a counsel of despair, however unwelcome the idea may be. It is more a matter of recognizing the limits of your tools

Even with a “mostly stable” and “mostly just” society, some injustices are going to call out to us, and we cannot afford to tolerate them. It poisons the soul to do so. But passing new laws isn’t always (and after enough laws have been passed, often isn't) the right solution. We—not the society as a whole, but individual you and I—have to try to ameliorate them ourselves.