What’s more, the accumulation of laws creates a drag on both prosperity and freedom. Jonathan Rauch calls the problem Demosclerosis, in his excellent book of the same name: Special interest laws build up kind of like arterial plaque, eventually choking off freedom. Economist Mancur Olson calls the same phenomenon “the web of special interests.” In his book The Rise and Decline of Nations, he suggests that this web will inevitably lead to economic and political stagnation, and can usually only be broken by some sort of catastrophic event, like a lost war or a revolution. Or we could just repeal some of the laws.
But nobody in Congress sees repealing laws as job No. 1. Well maybe one does, but he’s not doing such a great job getting it done. Last year, House Speaker John Boehner said, “We should not be judged on how many new laws we create. We should be judged on how many laws we repeal.”
And for that, at least, I have a proposed solution. It’s not really my idea, though I fleshed it out a bit in a law review article and a speech at Harvard Law School a while back. If the problem with Congress is that nobody sees repealing laws as job No. 1, why not create a legislative body that can only repeal laws?
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