Introduction

When I went to college I noticed a significant cultural difference between the US and The Netherlands: in The Netherlands one would study Law if flunked out on something else or did not know what to study at all (sorry to all erroneously insulted by this generalization), while in the US the best and the brightest would go to Law School. The explanation then was that Europe could rely more on a common culture, where the US relied more an additional laws. This emphasis on laws is also spreading to Europe: contracts in Europe used to be short, but these days they are ‘puffed up’ with all kinds of Attachments, Exhibits and Attachments to Attachments. This trend affects our society in several areas:

Law Enforcement

A friend of mine used to be an LAPD cop. He told me that he would focus on the tail lights over rear license plates, a common ‘irregularity’ which would allow him to stop most cars legally whenever he had another but illegitimate reason to do so. In effect, this use of the rules was nothing but a response to another rule, against harassment by police.

Another over-used rule is speeding: if governments really wanted to limit speeds, they would ensure cars would physically not be capable of driving faster than whatever the speed limit in that country allows. However, the collection of speeding tickets has turned into an underhanded and lucrative way of raising taxes.

Medical Insurance

One of the best examples of “Lawyer’s clogging” are the rules with respect to medical insurance when you are changing care insurers. It all starts with the ‘previous ailments’ which care insurers want to exclude from their insurance responsibilities. If person X is insured by company A and moves to company B which excludes the risk of an ailment that started while X was insured by company A, then company A should be held liable for that risk, logic teaches me. Just try and do that in real life. No wonder that people that are moving around for their work or for any other reason fall into this ‘uninsured trap’.

This challenge is only going to increase as more and more Europeans are going to travel across borders for more than 6 months and need to change their medical insurance as they do so. (Medical insurance is limited to a particular nation. That makes sense from an operational perspective, but it does hinder the free flow of people.)

Immigration

Even though immigration restrictions make sense, it does make significantly less sense to prohibit immigrants from working while they are awaiting the result of their asylum request. Especially since this might take up to several years. By not being allowed to work they are bored and – by definition – induced to enter the criminal circuit, while being prohibited from getting the best integration incentive of all: a job.

Companies

In this world of ever more (re-)integration of work and life, there are companies that absolutely forbid the use of company equipment for private use. Taken literally, that would forbid an employee to call the dentist for setting up an appointment. That the dentist is only open during office hours is only an inconvenient detail, of course.

Somehow, the rules of using private equipment for company use are much more lenient: if one uses the home Wifi to connect into the internet for the company laptop, nobody cares…

Another example is provided by software licensing agreements. Who is going to read 49 pages of legalistic text for an upgrade of a software package? A convenient solution by referring to an industry-set standard text would not make any sense at all, of course…

Same thing about music or movies: it has become so easy to download that copyright laws are hopelessly outdated and users are made criminals by the thousands, if not millions. Next thing is patent laws, where The Economist made an interesting case that current patent law in practice is also a protection for incumbents used to prevent innovation. All of these are arguments for legislation gone awry.

Conclusion

Any individual protesting against these stifling rules is usually powerless: companies or governments will not adjust their policies because of a single individual user who demonstrates it’s “ineffectiveness”, an immigrant rebelling against immigration laws risks being sent to jail (although usually at least in the country of destination) or maybe worse, having the entry request being turned down, and which car driver has never sped? In all of these cases, the power of balance has swayed too much to the lawyers. The rules have been made so one-sided and impossible to abide by, that ‘every’ citizen is almost automatically turned into a villain.

Summary

The US prides itself to be “The country of the Free”, but if one measures freedom not only in the taxes one has to pay but also in the absence of rules to obey, the ever growing clogging of “freedom arteries” by voluminous laws shows an ever decreasing freedom. The European Union is even worse: not only are rules to obey voluminous and increasing, it also becomes ever more unclear who is responsible for setting the rules. When even ‘professionals’ in governments do not even know whether responsibility for a topic lies with Brussels or with the national capital, how is a simple citizen supposed to know? Is that progress?