From NRO’s “The Corner“: Thousand-page bills, unread and indeed unwritten at the time of passage, are the death of representative government. They also provide a clue as to why, in a country this large, national government should be minimal and constrained. Even if you doubled or trebled the size of the legislature, the Conyers conundrum would still hold: No individual can read these bills and understand what he’s voting on. That’s why the bulk of these responsibilities should be left to states and subsidiary jurisdictions, which can legislate on such …
Although we’d like to see all lawmakers read all the bills they sign, we understand Rep. Conyers’s (D-MI) exasperation when he says the 1,018-page House health care bill is indecipherable without a a pair of lawyers to translate it. So maybe each lawmaker should get a whole team of lawyers to help read it? For taxpayers’ sake, let’s hope these lawyers don’t charge by the page: at $1.3 trillion, the bill clocks in at $1.264 billion per page. Better yet, lawmakers should write a bill that makes health care portable and affordable… and decipherable. …
In 1979, Robert Schuettinger and Eamonn Butler wrote a book called “Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls,” detailing 4,000 years of disastrous attempts by government to control market prices. Tomorrow, the House Judiciary Committee will vote on adding a 41st century to that litany of failure. The target: credit card “interchange fees.” Interchange fees are the fees paid by one bank to another, and passed on to merchants, as the price for processing a credit card purchase. They are set by credit card associations, such as MasterCard and Visa …
