All laws should have short expiry dates
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Not read link. Interesting concept but isn't there a Catch 22 that a law requiring short expiry dates would if it were to follow its own principles expire and thus whoever was in office at the time could just let it lapse and pass non-expiring laws?
Officially most taxes in the UK follow this concept. Income Tax etc expires annually and thus must be renewed annually with each budget authorisation which helps avoid some of the budget dramas you see in the States - if Parliament can't agree a budget then taxes would lapse and the State would have no income.
Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer
I'm not sure if we can take what Jefferson is saying here as advice to make laws temporary. He's more focused on the moral obligation people have to not take-on more government debt than can be paid in this current generation.
That said, it is an interesting concept. Though I wonder if it would be destabilizing if *all* laws had sunset clauses. After all, businesses don't like uncertainty like that. And it could really break the social contract if people were convicted of crimes that were no longer crimes a year later.
I wonder if there are categories of laws that should always have sunset clauses...
To me it seems that the traitise is more directed at privileges than at actual legislation. A sunset clause in all laws could be very destabilizing; e.g. what if Social Security would be considered to have 'lived its natural life' and would expire? The pension planning of millions upon millions of people would be thrown into utter chaos and the economy would go over the cliff.
Congratulations America
Is Social Security not a privilege more than a law? If that doesn't count, what does?
I know it's not just the UK which has the concept that taxes must be reauthorised annually with the budget. It is as I said in part to ensure responsible governance and avoid the partisan bullshit bunfights the States have had - but sadly it'd probably devolve their into another trigger for nonsense.
It's important to remember the era and the speaker. Early American colonists were fleeing European royalty and land barons.....who'd used their inherited land "rights" to exploit and extract from the common man, and maintain a distinct "class" society based on inheritance.I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, "that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living": that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by an individual ceases to be his when himself ceases to be, and reverts to the society. If the society has formed no rules for the appropriation of it's lands in severality, it will be taken by the first occupants. These will generally be the wife and children of the decedent. If they have formed rules of appropriation, those rules may give it to the wife and children, or to some one of them, or to the legatee of the deceased. So they may give it to his creditor. But the child, the legatee, or creditor takes it, not by any natural right, but by a law of the society of which they are members, and to which they are subject. Then no man can, by natural right, oblige the lands he occupied, or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the paiment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living, which would be the reverse of our principle.
Sounds like a convoluted way to justify taking land from indigenous people (Native Indians) by exploiting values (lopsided bartering), followed by contracts, and eventually force.But persons and property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course with those who gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.
Is the modern USA based on Jefferson or Madison ideals?Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years.
If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.
What? I don't see any point - convoluted or otherwise - justifying taking land from Indians.
But that's how the Americas were created. Hello?
Neither here nor there in the quotation being discussed though. Does everything have to go back to that? Hello.
The "quotation" was from Thomas Jefferson's letters to James Madison, during the creation of "The New World". No offense to you as a Brit, or your roots in "royalty loyalty", but it was quite different to create a new nation, on new land, with a new governing ideology.
The sad irony is that the Americas were created by displacing, or killing, its native inhabitants.
"No offense" but I'm not ignorant, my nationality doesn't play into it. I know American history of this period better than most Americans who don't care.
But that quote had nothing to do with Indians.
No offense to you as a ggt but i could probably find a letter from that time describing the price of eggs.
Re. the most obvious problem of uncertainty, can we come up with ways to ameliorate such problems?
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Well, what did you expect by putting up a link to one of Jefferson's letters, then saying "Discuss", when your thread title makes a conclusion I don't agree with?
I think it's about principles of property ownership, and property rights, in the New World vs Old Europe.
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