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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

It evolves. Laws, rules, regulations accrue but are very rarely re-evaluated to see if they serve their original purpose. It's easier for most lawmakers to leave things alone. Eventually, the state declines or fails under the weight of a century of well-intentioned (maybe) laws that have outlived their usefullness.

Knowing human nature, the best plan for a state that wants to survive is to set a 20 year expiration on laws. Broadly accepted laws would easily be renewed, but obsolete ones would be allowed to die.

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That's a matter of political culture and state institutions. Finland is largely governed by rewriting laws. Each government coalition has a few focus areas, where they try to do a major rewrite of all relevant laws and regulations. And then there smaller changes to many other laws. The initial drafts almost always come from career civil servants, and there are processes that try to ensure that all relevant viewpoints have been heard before the proposed changes go to the parliament.

That would be chaos. Imagine needing to sign a 10, 20 or 30 year agreement 6 months before a law expires.

Not a new idea but its a good one. Its basically garbage collection but for laws. Another term for it is "sunset clauses" where a law must have reasonable conditions for expiring instead of being on the books for the rest of time.

In practice that would create even more ineffective veto points that already result in stasis and dysfunction in the US Congress.

For more than a decade the US has been stuck operating by renewing the same budget more or less with minor modifications at random intervals of time depending on the political mood. It always gets approved eventually after occasional pointless, wasteful shutdowns. But nothing actually changes from those veto points, just more routine dysfunction and grandstanding.

Same with debt ceiling. Another veto point that gives leverage but has zero effect on actual spending. It probably sounded like a brilliant idea to control spending in the 70s or whenever it originated. But is entirely ineffective at the purpose of addressing the deficit.

Self expiring legislation would very likely end up the same way. Just another pro forma procedural roadblock that wastes time and makes the legislature even less effective at real problem solving instead of posturing.

"Self expiring legislation would very likely end up the same way."

Most laws in most countries (including the US) have sunset clauses. They are incredibly common and have existed for centuries.

> to set a 20 year expiration on laws

Wait, do we need to pass a law for this?

This might be a good idea for marriages, too.

And driver's license

This is like cryptocurrencies.

Every new generation is convinced that all the cruft of the existing system is useless or obsolete so they create a new system without the cruft based on "first principles" or somesuch bullshit. And then through pain and loss they rediscover why all that cruft was there in the original system in the first place. What seems "obsolete" is many times a bedrock principle of the old system that only seems obsolete now because it is/was so effective that the problem it is intended to address/prevent no longer occurs.

Also, legislators review the existing laws all the time. Most "new" laws are just amendments to existing laws.

Well, partly. Cryptocurrencies rediscovered why there are so many regulations. But they also enabled near-instant (hours) cross-border transactions in a way the existing system just can't do because it is too ossified. It also allows people to opt out of regulations they feel are getting in their way too much, which is a good check against over-regulation.

In other words, both the old way and the new way have value. The perfect ideal system is probably a synthesis of both, but in lieu of that, we can have both separately.

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