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Comment by ip26 | Hacker News Reader

The legislature is supposed to move carefully, but it must still be able to actually legislate. US Congress, for example, is steadily passing fewer and fewer laws every year. If the current trend continues, fifty years from now Congress will enact zero new laws. That isn't being careful, that's paralyzed.

https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-CONGRESS/PRODUCTIVITY/e...

P.S. law is only permanent when the legislature is unable to enact new law to change or repeal it

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>[the legislature] must still be able to actually legislate

No, it doesn't have to.

Remember, the legislature is voted by the electorate, the voting public at large; the people of the city, county, state or country as applicable. If the legislature ends up so divided that passing laws with a supermajority to overrule executive vetos is impractical if not impossible, that suggests the people are divided and cannot come to a consensus on issues to be debated.

Why should the legislature pass laws when the people can't come to an agreement? That's not democratic. If the people can't agree, neither should their representatives agree and it's the duty of the executive to veto such legislative overreach.

In the real world there are other effects besides local votes. In the US limiting the amount of representatives in the legislature was resulted in 1 legislator for more and more people in civilization. If I represent hundreds of thousands of people how do I get a consensus from those people? The people when polled nationally agree on abortion or gun control poll for action by a decent percentage but congress has not acted. Also the legislature does more then pass new laws they vote on military appointments, sign treaties, determine judges, create budgets and more.

What requires legislators to contue to pass new laws? Is the expectstion that our body of laws must always grow or we have failed as a country?

Not passing laws is totally acceptable if there aren't any proposed laws that help further the will of the people.

While true that seems like an unlikely situation because human culture and knowledge are not static. At the very least, repealing old archaic laws that don’t serve us or are harmful would be a good idea and it’s self-evident those still exist on the books.

Culture and knowledge don't require laws though, right?

I'd argue that a law based on culture or current knowledge is a bad law precisely because both knowledge and culture are always evolving. Laws that don't come with an expiration date should be timeless, at which point they couldn't be based on today's culture or knowledge.

Not sure what world you’re living in. Even rape and murder, for example, is defined and prosecuted different today than it has been in the past. Surely that suggests that even things you might think to define as “timeless” aren’t quite so timeless. That’s ignoring the fact that there’s all sorts of regulations that are regulated by law. There’s also all sorts of laws that govern how government itself operates and it would be naive to imagine that what works for a country of a few million at the founding would work for a country of tens and then hundreds of millions. And then there’s things like EPA and healthcare which are governed by laws and very much should be updated as we learn new things and find new ways of doing things or technology makes a different way of doing things make more sense.

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