Laws are like technology. Over time, they become one of two things: indispensable or obsolete. It’s beyond me why most state and federal laws don’t have 15- or 20-year sunset clauses, so we could periodically dispense with the obsolete ones like so many floppy disc drives and 8-track tape decks. (Remember them?)…

If you think 11,000 words is a lot, consider this: In 1925 it would have taken you 12 days to read all the United States’ federal laws and regulations if you plowed through about 200 pages per day. Today that same task would take you three years. You can thank the 5,000 pages of Obamacare and Dodd–Frank for the extra 25 days of study.

And none of this even counts state laws, of which we now have 40,000 new flavors. Utah has banned Happy Hour. Illinois motorcyclists can now run red lights if they don’t change quickly enough. And if you want to drive a golf cart in Georgia, it simply must have a horn.

Does California really need a law banning the awarding of goldfish as carnival prizes? And apparently Californians weren’t already confident that “criminal profiteering activity” was an apt description of forcing a girl under 18 to perform sex acts for money — so now there’s a law explicitly saying so.