Especially on July 4, James Madison must be turning in his grave. Here is one reason, among others.
The Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States lists all tariffs imposed by the U.S. government. Revision 8 of the 2019 edition, dated July 2019, contains 3,882 pages. You can download it from the United States International Trade Commission.
To be fair, the Harmonized Tariff Schedule also contains tariffs at a zero rate, that is, tariffs that could be imposed but are not for the moment.
These 3,882 pages of tariff details add to the Code of Federal Regulations’ more than 185,000 pages. (This last figure is from Clyde Wayne Crews, “Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State,” Competitive Enterprise Institute, 2019, p. 18).
I understand that James Madison is now recognized as the author of Federalist #62 (it used to be debated whether it was Alexander Hamilton instead), but any other author among the Founders would probably also turn in his grave. Madison wrote:
The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessing of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?
Erratum: I erased two sentences from this post after a reader indicated a bad error I made in calculating (and greatly overestimating) the disk space occupied by the Harmonized Tariff Schedule. I don’t think it changes my main points. Sorry.
READER COMMENTS
Robert EV
Jul 4 2019 at 2:55am
How many of those laws are applicable to any given person?
There are arguments for tradition and precedent (though I’m glad they aren’t written into the constitution), sure, consistency across the law is a more important consideration in my eyes.
Jon Murphy
Jul 4 2019 at 8:30am
What do you mean by this? How many of the laws a person might affect a person any given day or how many apply to people such that of they were to violate the law, it would result in punishment?
Robert EV
Jul 4 2019 at 12:41pm
The former.
Jon Murphy
Jul 4 2019 at 1:59pm
Thank you. As I understand it, the number is fairly substantial, such that almost every adult male has committed some federal crime at some point in their life. For example, I’m willing to bet everyone who has brought a pet to a national park has violated this law: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/36/2.15
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 4 2019 at 8:59pm
Robert: It is estimated that 40% of American adults have criminal records, of which a little than three-fourths pertains to misdemeanors. Some 44% of American adults have an arrest record. See Nicholas Eberstadt, “America’s Invisible Felon Population: A Blind Spot in US National Statistics” and the references cited there.
john hare
Jul 4 2019 at 4:23am
How many of those laws are applicable to any given person?
How long would it take you to find out? Because the ones that did apply that you hadn’t found yet are the problem. Consider how long it would take you to fully read and understand even 1% of those 185,000 pages of federal regulation.
Robert EV
Jul 4 2019 at 12:49pm
Ignorance of the law is sometimes an excuse.
Also, when buying a small quantity of juice concentrate from overseas a year or so ago it took less than half an hour of searching to determine that import tariffs weren’t applicable. The only law I needed to know is that import tariffs were sometimes applicable, and I could search the entire list for my particular purposes in a short amount of time, easily ruling out the non-applicable listings.
Variant local jurisdiction laws are a bigger concern for most people than are monstrously large Federal laws.
Benjamin Cole
Jul 4 2019 at 6:21am
I look forward to Pierre Lemieux reviewing Euclid v. Ambler Realty, the 1926 Supreme Court ruling, which by split-vote overruled lower courts and decided property zoning was Constitutional.
One of the justices gratuitously opined he did not like apartment buildings, that he termed “parasites.” being built in single-family detached housing neighborhoods. The case was about a city (Euclid) zoning land as industrial.
From this ruling, we now how a situation where is a criminal act to build dense housing in most of Los Angele County, and many other jurisdictions.
Rent control will discourage new construction?—that does not really matter, as new dense-housing construction is outlawed anyway. Rent control is a moot point, though it may limit economic rents.
Yes, I know “free trade” is in the news now.
A much, much larger economic structural impediment in the US is property zoning.
The libertarian, free-market types are barking up the wrong trees.
Floccina
Jul 5 2019 at 3:43pm
+1
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 5 2019 at 3:46pm
What do you mean, Floccina?
Jon Murphy
Jul 5 2019 at 4:27pm
When someone writes “+1”, it means they agree with the post. It’s from Reddit, I think.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 8 2019 at 12:55am
Thanks, Jon.
Phil H
Jul 4 2019 at 10:53pm
Here is an alternative view:
What these laws represent is the combined knowledge of the ages: If you’re going to do X, you should do it in manner Y. In the 1700s, that knowledge was relatively limited. In the 1900s it exploded, and we now have much more of it. That’s not a bad thing. Wishing for less knowledge about how to do things is no more or less than primitivism.
Mark Z
Jul 5 2019 at 5:09am
This seems pretty obviously incorrect. Knowledge of how to do something correctly doesn’t’ require a gun being pointed at one’s head, and if getting someone to do something requires such coercion, it’s probably not because the person holding the gun happens to have the special knowledge of how things ought to be done. In my general experience, if one person has a better way of doing things than another, the preferred method of convincing the latter to change their method isn’t, ‘do what I say or I’ll hurt you.’ And why should we expect that those who happen to be holding the gun (or paying the salaries of those holding the guns) are more likely to have access to this knowledge of how things ought to be done?
Practical knowledge is, by definition, useful, and if you can’t convince others to make use of it, you can at least out compete them and drive them out of business. If a bit of knowledge can only be put to use by being imposed by force (i.e., via the law), I would seriously doubt that it’s actually knowledge at all.
Jon Murphy
Jul 5 2019 at 8:34am
Yeah, I’m not really sure that explains the growth of legislation for several reasons:
1. It doesn’t explain why some legislation is repealed
2. It doesn’t explain why compromise is necessary to pass legislation
3. It implies there is only one correct way to do things, which is obviously incorrect
3a. It doesn’t explain why legislation is different among countries
3b. It doesn’t explain why legislation is different among states
3c. It doesn’t explain why some legislation works in A but not in B
4. It doesn’t account for the tacit and local knowledge that only individuals posses
5. It doesn’t explain the common law system, or any non-dictatorial system of law
6. It assumes superhuman knowledge on the part of legislators
7. It doesn’t explain why legislation is required in the first place (if the way of doing X is so obvious that legislators, who have no direct knowledge of X, can see it, why is force required? Except for a small subset of problems, the knowledge itself would be enough)
8. It doesn’t explain revolutions
9. It doesn’t explain corruption
10. It doesn’t explain why foreign aid as largely been a failure
11. It doesn’t explain the failure of governments in Afghanistan, Iraq after the US invasion
Phil H
Jul 5 2019 at 12:38pm
Thanks, guys. I’ll put the answers to these together.
Mark: “Knowledge of how to do something correctly doesn’t’ require a gun being pointed at one’s head”
Yes, it does. Do you have children? If you do, reflect a moment on how they learned stuff; if you don’t look at the parents around you. We *force* kids to learn things all the time, because they have to be forced.
“Practical knowledge is…useful, and…you can at least out compete them and drive them out of business.”
Yes, but the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent (or alive). Your argument is of the general form: If X is wrong it would not happen. (I’m claiming that regulations represent good practice, you’re saying that if that’s true, the regulations would not need to exist, because bad practice would not be done anyway.) And that general kind of argument is just silly! Bad practice and wrongness happens all the time!
Jon: “It doesn’t explain revolutions”… What?! No, I wasn’t trying to explain revolutions. Let me go back and see if I can follow your train of thought.
“It doesn’t explain why some legislation is repealed” I guess not, but (1) knowledge changes (advances), and (2) a lot of regulation is more about coordination than actual knowledge. There are different possible coordination points, and we can switch between them.
“It implies there is only one correct way to do things” No, nothing I said implies that.
“It doesn’t explain why legislation is different among countries”… Um, because the countries are different? I mean… I’m not sure what kind of an explanation you’re looking for here!
“It assumes superhuman knowledge”… What? I mean, in a way, it does, just as every scientist has superhuman knowledge – she stands on the shoulders of giants. Every U.S. politician has political abilities that far outshine every pre-1750 politician by virtue of their experience of working within what is probably the best political system ever designed. So, yes, superhuman in that sense: no single human could come up with it. And indeed, no single human *did* come up with it. Most regulations are actually written by industry, right? They are the accumulation of the industry’s choices over many years, plus the needs of the bureaucratic state.
Your (7) is a repeat of Mark’s point, and I reply in the same way: stupid exists. Your (8)-(11) are kinda crazytown… I didn’t attempt to explain any of those things!
Jon Murphy
Jul 5 2019 at 1:34pm
Revolutions are rebellions against legislation. If legislation is just aa way of codifying the best way to do something, then there’s no reason to rebel.
1) True, and part of my point. Thus, legislation cannot be about codifying knowledge and it certainly cannot be “the combined knowledge of the ages,” as that is constantly changing. Legislation is supposed to be changed very slowly.
2) Coordination is tied up closely with knowledge. See the work of Thomas Schelling (especially “The Strategy of Conflict”) and Daniel Klein (Especially “Knowledge and Coordination”). It’s something of a mistake to separate them. Besides, you made the claim that legislation is merely the knowledge of the ages. If you want to separate knowledge and coordination, then your initial claim seems in tension with that.
Exactly. Your theory of legislation does not account for that if it is merely the knowledge of ages.
That is part of it, but not all of it. There’s much more knowledge to be had (see Hayek, especially Use of Knowledge in Society and Leoni, especially Freedom and the Law). Relational knowledge, local knowledge, etc., are all important and that cannot be gained by standing on the shoulders of giants.
To which I reply that statement is true but irrelevant. It does not answer Mark or my point.
I know you didn’t. That’s part of the reason why I reject your theory of legislation. Any theory of legislation would need to take those factors into account. The fact you don’t try to explain them is problematic. It’s like having a theory of astronomy without explaining where planets come from.
Phil H
Jul 5 2019 at 11:57pm
Thanks, Jon.
I’m really not understanding your point about revolutions, different countries, etc. Perhaps you’re over-interpreting what I mean by “knowledge”. I don’t mean something very firm and absolute – I’m not talking Euclid’s Geometry-style knowledge, here, unshakeable foundations of human rationality. I’m just talking everyday ordinary changeable knowledge, like “There is gold in California”… until there isn’t. Knowledge changes, legislation changes. People know different stuff in different countries, and people have different laws in different countries. We haven’t defined either of these very carefully, but on rough everyday readings, they seem comparable.
On knowledge vs. coordination – you’re right, they’re closely related. That’s why I didn’t distinguish them originally. But clearly coordination issues mean that I could know methods A, B, and C all work, yet choose to legislate to allow A only – this is one way in which legislative choices might be finer-grained and more subject to change than current knowledge.
“Relational knowledge, local knowledge, etc., are all important and that cannot be gained by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Why on earth not? Local giants have lots of local knowledge, and you can learn from them. Relational knowledge does not have to be completely relearned every generation. These giants are not the giants of science, they are just the people who came before us and advanced knowledge of whatever endeavour we are engaged in.
“Any theory of legislation would need to take those factors into account…” (1) Actually, I’m not sure it would. A theory of legislation only needs to explain those things that aren’t obviously explained by other factors. And the fact that differences exist in international legislation is obviously explained by the fact that countries are different. (2) I fairly obviously didn’t try to sketch a full theory of legislation in a four line blog comment!
But there is no inconsistency at least between my idea and the issues you raise. People in different countries know different things (and coordinate in different ways) so different countries have different legislation. People disagree on knowledge, so legislation changes when different people come to power. Etc., etc.
Anyway, thank you for the references, I will go and have a look at them.
Jon Murphy
Jul 8 2019 at 11:27am
My point about revolution etc is these are rebellions against legislation. Any theory of legislation must include why legislation fails, why people revolt against it. This theory that legislation is merely codified knowledge does not allow for revolutions.
Further, your theory does not actually allow for legislation or knowledge to change. Legislation by its nature, especially since you say it is more “fine-grained” does not allow for alternative actions. Thus, no new knowledge can be discovered, thus no legislation can be changed. This is a problem Hayek points out in Meaning of Competition, Freidman discusses in Capitalism and Freedom, and Smith discusses in Wealth of Nations.
Phil H
Jul 5 2019 at 12:43pm
Let me just restate this in a gentler way. In the 1770s, there were no cars. There are cars now. We would expect to need a (little bit of) regulation on cars now, and none then. So the fact that we have more regulation now than then shouldn’t really be a surprise.
The very very very large increase in regulation is perhaps a surprise. I’m suggesting that it has in fact come about because of a very very very large increase in the volume and variety of things that are done in the USA. Now, I’m clearly right that that increase in the amount of stuff happening is very very very large. What I’m asking is: Do you have a good reason to think that regulation should not have grown proportionally with the complexity of society?
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 5 2019 at 1:17pm
Phil: Your questions are important questions. I think you would find that Friedrich Hayek (and, in fact, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Anthony de Jasay) have answered them in a traditionalist perspective similar to yours, but with very different conclusions. Benito Mussolini said: “We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become.” Hayek replied that it is because of individual liberty (and not because of restrictions of individual liberty by the state) that civilization could become more complex. See Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, and his two famous articles on the economics of knowledge: “Economics and Knowledge” (1937) and “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945).
A quick note on your statement “Every U.S. politician has political abilities that far outshine every pre-1750 politician.” I don’t know why you chose the cutoff date of 1750. Anyway, it is quite clear that some politicians long before that knew more than today’s politicians: think about Cicero in the Roman senate, or (compared to Trump) emperor Marcus Aurelius. If you choose 1787 as the cutoff date, you will have problems answering the question: Which one of today’s politicians could have written the Federalist Papers? Now, if by superior “political abilities,” you mean the ability to satisfy special interests at the detriment of the vast majority of the population while increasing the politicians’ own power, I would agree with you (although 19th-century American politicians were quite efficient in that too).
Phil H
Jul 6 2019 at 12:11am
Hi, Pierre. Thanks, those are interesting ideas and references. I would, however, like to double down and give a somewhat radical answer to a couple of your questions:
“…some politicians long before that knew more than today’s politicians: think about Cicero in the Roman senate, or (compared to Trump) emperor Marcus Aurelius. If you choose 1787 as the cutoff date, you will have problems answering the question: Which one of today’s politicians could have written the Federalist Papers?”
I’m going to go ahead and assert that Trump is a better politician than both Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. Clearly (I think!) not because of Trump’s personal brilliance, but because he has lived and worked in the American system. He knows many things that neither Cicero nor Marcus knew: how to campaign to an electorate numbering in the millions; how to divide the government into branches; how to achieve his goals without using violence; how to engage in foreign relations; etc., etc.
Similarly, which of today’s politicians could write the Federalist Papers – most of them. Because they learned them in high school. And in addition to the federalist papers, they have also learned from the entire history of the 20th century: its legislation, its jurisprudence, its executive actions.
I honestly believe in progress: I think the US polity is better than what came before it, and is better now than it was in the 1700s, 1800s, and most of the 1900s. In particular, the ever-decreasing use of violence seems to me to be the great human triumph. And I actually think having lots and lots of rules tends to decrease violence, if only by slowing everything down. So the large increase in the volume of legislation doesn’t worry me that much.
Jon Murphy
Jul 5 2019 at 1:54pm
In addition to Pierre’s comment above, you may also find Adam Smith’s discussion of casuistry in Part VII of Theory of Moral Sentiments helpful (pages 485-503 in this facsimile version). Smith discusses the extreme difficulty coming up with hard and fast rules for the vast majority of things given how much gray area there is in what is acceptable behavior. Casuistry is a form of moral philosophy and jurisprudence that tries to set rules for everything. And, while some rules are easily set (such as the rules of justice, which boil down to “don’t mess with other people’s stuff,”) other rules are extraordinarily difficult to codify as they rely on aesthetics and other loose, vague, and indeterminant factors.
One final point:
Your last sentence does not follow from this example. Autos replaced horse and buggies, ferries, coaches, and other forms of transportation. Thus, as autos came onto the scene with regulatory necessities, the older, obsolete things should fall out with their regulations going the way of the dodo. So it doesn’t necessarily follow that increasing technology necessarily means increasing regulations.
Phil H
Jul 6 2019 at 3:13am
Hi, Jon. I’ll have a look at the reference, thanks. But your two points don’t actually address my argument.
(1) Making rules is hard – sure, was hard then, is hard now. But the number of things about which we need to make rules has increased.
(2) Technology is replaced – no, it isn’t. There are still horses in the USA. There are still letters, despite email. There are still plays, despite Hollywood. There are still wooden houses, despite brick and concrete. The total number of technologies used, the total number of industries, and the total scale of economic activity have multiplied manyfold.
Honestly, I’m very surprised that no one has given a single solid counterargument to my point. This is a fairly basic argument, isn’t it? You think that more rules make us less free. But we play more games now. More games naturally means more rules. You’ve told me that we’re not really playing more games, that making rules is hard, and that I haven’t explained revolutions. None of these answer the basic point.
Jon Murphy
Jul 6 2019 at 7:08am
We have. The problem, I think, is your argument has quickly become begging the question; you’ve assumed you’re right, so it’s impossible to prove you wrong since it would violate the assumptions of the question (your response to Pierre about Trump being better by virtue of the fact he is an American politician is case in point of this)
john hare
Jul 5 2019 at 4:56pm
You seem to believe regulations are the collected wisdom of the country. So you’re okay with all regulations on zoning, vending, and so on?
Phil H
Jul 6 2019 at 3:14am
Yes, I love all zoning and vending regulations. I’m indifferent to so on.
Glenn Ammons
Jul 11 2019 at 1:42am
Minor correction: the tariffs PDF you link to is 124 MB, not 16 GB. I’m still not going to read it 🙂
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 13 2019 at 12:16am
Thanks, Glenn. My error seems to be even worse–an error of zeros! When I look in the properties of the file, I get 16 MB, not 16 GB. I don’t know how you get 124 MB–but if that’s an error, it is much less bad than mine.
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