It's been a while!

I haven't been writing a lot, although I've been wanting to. I've been having a lot of school and it's been hard to find something to write about, and when i did i rarely found the time to sit down and write it.

That having been said, I was thinking about the whole deal with Regulation vs. Deregulation in the government. Almost every time something goes wrong, most people think "There should have been a law against that!"

My favorite example is children and firearms. Every time a child gets its hands on a gun (usually through irresponsible parents) and hurts itself, people cry out "There needs to be a law against that! We have to protect the children!"

Well, hacking off the last sentence (a meaningless appeal to emotion), you get:

"There needs to be a law against that!"

You mean a law that prevents children from having firearms? I'm pretty sure we've already got one of those, and I don't see the use in making a second one. Often times when people cry out for "new laws" they're asking for laws that already exist and can't really be made better.

The real problem is this: Sometimes people do stupid things and tragedies happen. Unfortunately, you can't outlaw stupidity and there's no sense in trying because all that happens is you tick off everyone and stupid things still happen.

This applies to larger scale things to, like the financial crisis. I could talk about that too, but Mike Masnick, primary writer my favorite blog, Techdirt, has put it more clearly, succinctly, and to the point than I could. He's dead on too:

"It wasn't a lack of regulations that was the problem that resulted in the financial crisis -- it was the fact that people actually thought the regulators who were in place were protecting us from such a mess. Real regulators are a problem. Imaginary, platonic ideal regulators would be great, but they don't exist."

Exactly. I'd suggest reading Mike's article and the stuff it links to. I'd really suggest keeping up with Techdirt as a whole, since it's filled with pure win.