"Comprehensive": Cover For Central Planners

Alter to Reason

Comprehensive legislation -- whether emanating from a city council or the US Congress -- is bound to be destructive.  The differences lie only in limits of hubris and the scale of harm. At the moment I'm thinking of the push for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, the recent fiasco of healthcare reform and proposed "grand bargains" to reshape the economy.   I believe the principle applies universally.

Incremental legislation, by contrast, is more targeted, manageable, easily understood, simple and transparent.  Its outcomes and costs are less difficult to predict. When mistakes are made they are easier to remedy.  On the other hand, incremental is harder than comprehensive.  Since incremental initiatives will be elements in a larger (comprehensive) scheme, they will require careful planning, sequencing, coordinating and prioritizing.  Once implemented and evaluated in action, an element may indicate the need to revise parts of the plan not yet launched.


No significant change is likely to be made without unintended consequences to society, the economy and politics.  The danger of great, complex and complicated changes administered in a single stroke lies in the potential for the undoing of institutions that facilitate the workings of civil society and government.  Examples from the past are not wanting.  Our clearest historical precedent, an archetype of potential risks of comprehensive reform, is the French Revolution. [1]


Strawman: "OK, Mr. Blogger, just what's so bad about comprehensive legislation?  I mean just look at all the problems we've got.  We haven't got time to wait.  Why not just think 'em through and take care of a lotta stuff all at once?"  Good question.  Let's talk about it.

What's Wrong With Comprehensive Legislation?
And here, I should include the proliferation of abusive regulations that follow in the wake of comprehensive bills.  I've written two prior essays on this subject.  Part I and Part II go into more detail than I treat with here.  I first became interested in the subject when I read The Death of Common Sense, by Philip K. Howard, who persuasively makes the case that the body and uses of statute law, case law, and lawmaking itself has seriously deteriorated since about the 1970's, so that the government has expanded and consolidated its power at the expense of private citizens.  Since reading The Death of Common Sense, my interest has been sustained by Life Without Lawyers, by the same author and by, Three Felonies A Day, by Harvey Silverglate, who deals with rapidly expanding criminalization and coercion by government.

What's wrong with comprehensive legislation, simply put, is that, like socialist planned economies, it greatly exceeds anyone's ability to anticipate its social, political and economic consequences. [2]  Or its ultimate cost in dollars to implement it and then to repeatedly fix inevitable problems that lead to still more legislation.  Comprehensive legislation bloats government, increases its power to coerce and micro-manage our lives, undermines what remains of our free-market economy by expanding mercantilism (crony capitalism) and it is hopelessly opaque.  It invites every kind of abuse.

All legislation attracts mischief, and all but the simplest, clearest and most transparent will end up containing it.  The larger and more complex legislation becomes the more certain that it will contain serious problems.  Some intentionally seeded to achieve some unrelated agenda, and some from human limitations to foreseeing consequences.  Let me make the point by analogy: if a handful of weevils can be hidden in a kilogram of wheat, how many might be concealed in a barrel?  Or a silo?


Rule of Law
For the rule of law to function as intended the law must be intelligible.   The law must be written narrowly and in clear language, which, since the 70's us rarely done.  When laws are written broadly, intended to be self-enforcing and in arcane language government and the courts can apply them in whatever way suits them.

Social Destabilization and Criminalization
Lawmakers want to be seen as motivated by good intentions; that desire easily overcomes their concern about good results. Two extant examples that are particularly egregious are the laws that enabled the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs [3].  In the first case the intent was to help the chronically poor, on the one hand, and the temporarily poor on the other.  The result was a huge systemic shift that destroyed families, corrupted civil society, undermined the work ethic, increased the sense of entitlement and entrapped millions in chronic poverty, while assuring that future generations shall remain there.
More than any other government initiative the War on Drugs has taken away the liberty and sovereignty from American citizens.  It has led to the unnecessarily aggressive use and militarization of law enforcement and the intrusive invasions of privacy everywhere.  Both programs have led to the rapid growth of government, profligate spending and the entrenchment of legion rent-seeking cronies.


Corrupt, Politicized Priorities
Though priorities may be written into new legislation, the more comprehensive it is the less likelihood that priorities will be addressed carefully or taken seriously.  Prioritizing is hard work, even in small matters; lawmakers and their staffs eschew hard work.  As a consequence,  every element of a comprehensive plan, once it has been passed, takes its priority from political calculations rather that from the demands of the project itself.  Enormous waste, re-doing and destructive conflicts often combine to render the initiative all but unworkable.  Incremental legislation, by contrast, is far more understandable, manageable and transparent, and it requires that priorities be established in advance.  I offer here another analogy to illustrate the hazards.  Suppose you want to build a house.  That is an undertaking that requires careful sequencing: purchase land, obtain architectural plans and local permits, obtain materials, engage contractors and set up the order of construction.  Failure to follow the order will have obvious  and immediate unwanted results.  For example the roof should be installed before the sheetrock is put up; the landscaping should not be completed before the house is all but complete.  But now suppose government wants to build a house.  They write legislation enabling the construction of a house.  How will it be done?  Not to worry, we'll work that out after the law passes.  At this point the sequence of events becomes politically driven.  Maybe some members of the Select Committee on Housebuilding have an important (and impatient) constituent in the sheetrock trade.  And maybe other committee members have one in the landscaping business.  Well, you see how it is....


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1.  The French Revolution (though other revolutions and sweeping reforms have been more pernicious) is particularly instructive since Edmund Burke's reaction to it laid the groundwork for modern Anglo-American conservatism.  Burke saw with alarm the consequences that would follow from the wholesale abandonment of the traditions that underpin robust civil society.  The question -- then as now -- has not been whether change is desirable, but how many customs that have served us well over time we are willing to cast aside in pursuit of change on the grand scale.  Which brings me to what I argue for in this essay: that deliberate, incremental change, wherever possible, is preferable to sudden, systemic change.  Incremental change has two advantages: it makes things easier for societies to adapt with minimal disruption, and it takes into account the limitations of the human mind accurately to predict the consequences of changing many things at once.  Both advantages stand in marked contrast to the inevitable, hallmark failures of statist central economic and social planning.
It curious to me -- and troubling -- that so many politicians on the Right ignore the very core principles of conservatism; either they do not know of, or are not informed by the lessons discerned by Edmund Burke.
The illustration above, Alter to Reason, symbolizes, in my view, the stunning hubris of the Jacobins, who believed that reason alone could suffice to replace centuries of social, political and religious tradition.

2.  One can argue that some kinds of reform that cannot be done piecemeal.  A switch from a graduated income/wealth tax to, say, a flat tax, would seem to be an example. Though I haven't said so until now, part of my own perception of "comprehensive" implies great complexity.  The move to a flat tax is relatively straightforward, and we have successful models to learn from.  But a move to the Fair Tax, lacks precedent and poses so many structural and logistical difficulties that I would oppose it as the kind of comprehensive reform I deal with in this essay..
3.  Any plan that alludes to "war" is bound to enable government usurpation.  Robert Higgs in his Crisis and Leviathan leaves the principle in no doubt.