MOST House or Senate bills are as “effective” as the usual legislative resolution which is merely an official expression of a widely held sentiment — or hope. But lawmakers, through all these years, continue to pass bills to do this and that or to prevent this and that. As for voters, not many of them have the time or patience to find out if any of the laws passed on their behalf (and supposedly for their own good) have actually achieved their goals — or if they have created new or worse problems.
These measures include the anti-littering law, “zero tolerance” on drugs, curfew for minors, the creation of a financially self-sufficient and independent public health corporation, the blighted property maintenance law, among many other well-intentioned and popular laws, including those that many of us no longer remember but are all there in the statute books.
The things that cannot be legislated are often the subject of many pieces of legislation which is the reason why many voters are frustrated and end up blaming elected officials for “failing” to fulfill their campaign promises. Actually, not one single candidate for office — however pure hearted or intelligent — can fulfill many of the usual campaign promises that many voters want to hear: job security, higher wages, more benefits, lower prices, more choices for consumers, better and more affordable (if not free) healthcare, better and more affordable utility services, scholarships, homestead lots, government-backed low-interest loans, a crime-free/drug free community, etc. etc.
There is one thing that can help provide the funding for all those goodies: prosperity through economic growth which, however, takes time, and usually requires legislation to repeal or amend current laws that are preventing economic growth. Such legislation is seldom popular.
So yes, one may say that generally speaking legislating is an almost useless task. Many laws do not do what they’re supposed to do. Usually, moreover, they create new or bigger problems.
But politically, legislation is all the rage. Like candidates for office, many voters, not familiar with history, recent or otherwise, believe in the legislative process.
Writing in 1884, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer called it the “fundamental error pervading the thinking of nearly all parties”: “that evils admit of immediate and radical remedies. ‘If you will but do this, the mischief will be prevented.’ ‘Adopt my plan, and the suffering will disappear.’…”
And yet most if not almost all of the government’s problems that candidates say require legislation are the creations and/or the consequences of previous and no less well-intentioned legislation. And what is the popular “solution” in every election year? To elect politicians saying the same darn things that have been said, more or less, by equally eager, good-hearted, intelligent “for the people” candidates since the dawn of democratic elections.
Voters with selective amnesia and candidates with recycled promises.
These seem to be the basic features of politics (everywhere).
Spencer again:
“[H]e thinks of the body politic as admitting of being shaped thus or thus at will; and the tacit implication of many Acts of Parliament is that aggregated men, twisted into this or that arrangement, will remain as intended. [But] facts forced on his attention hour by hour should make everyone sceptical as to the success of this or that proposed way of changing a people’s actions. Alike to the citizen and to the legislator, home-experiences daily supply proofs that the conduct of human beings baulks calculation.
“Yet, difficult as he finds it to deal with humanity in detail, he is confident of his ability to deal with embodied humanity. Citizens, not one-thousandth of whom he knows, not one-hundredth of whom he ever saw, and the great mass of whom belong to classes having habits and modes of thought of which he has but dim notions, he feels sure will act in ways he foresees, and fulfil ends he wishes.”
Because many voters cling to assumptions that fly in the face of what we call reality (or arithmetic), many politicians must echo the same flapdoodle to get elected. No one among the candidates, for example, would publicly declare that s/he is for “corruption.” Everyone’s “against” it. Hence, there are many laws, local and federal, that target public corruption.
In politics, however, there also exists the no less insidious intellectual and moral corruption spawned by relentless pandering and grandstanding — of trying to be popular, of peddling political snake oil and other supposed cure-alls instead of asking hard questions whose answers many of us would rather not know.
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