Pretty self explanatory really, whenever the government passes something new, they should be forced to put a reasonable time limit it for when the given law should expire, and with the new law or whatever they pass, they should have to give a plan on how they're going to tackle the root causes of the problem.

All the time, new smartass governments come in an introduce more and more stuff, and before we know it, every little bit of our lives is going to be regulated: acts are introduced much more frequently than they are repealed.

Instead of taking the lazy route out and saying 'raves are now banned', what governments should do is put a time limit of 3 years or so on the new law, and take measures in them 3 years to reduce the negative effects which arose illegal raves taking place: i.e. collaborating with rave organisers and trying to get them to obtain proper licenses: trying to create examples that decent events CAN take place illegally: basically using the illegality of the culture to compliment the positive measures the governments are taking. By using police to shut down raves and stuff, you're forcing people out of the underground who are causing trouble, and using positive measures to get them to go to licensed events.

Now when those 3 years are up, the law should be repealed: hopefully in that space of time, organisers, partygoers .etc .etc have been educated by the positive steps taken by the government, and convinced that safe and fun events can take place within the law, and there's no reason to attack on people's liberties until it all starts to become a big issue again.

If scenes realise that if they're responsible, their livelihoods won't get cracked down on, and if they're irresponsible, the law's going to come down hard on them, I think people will actually feel more responsible for themselves and connect with the whole legal and political system. At the moment, when governments just outright ban stuff forever, they're creating illegal scenes which grow totally out of control.

OR

They could not make bullshit futile laws which attempt to tackle the symptoms of problems rather than the root cause of the problems, without any time limit on the laws they do pass. Why impose a time limit at all?

Take your example:

Politicians love to slate binge drinking, drug taking and unlicensed music events. These are symptoms. The root problems are young people with fuck all better to do, and the fact that day to day life is nigh on unbearable as result of the culture of suffocation. Put any animal in cage and it's natural response is to try and escape. If a person can't escape the cage physically, they escape it mentally. Some people are lucky enough to have flash homes and foreign holidays to occupy their conscious thought. Some people escape it with pills and booze. It may be bad for you and be irresponsible, but a caged animal is not rational. I know from pheasant trapping, if you leave it in long enough it gets itself so stressed and panicked it kills itself slowly by grating itself on the chicken wire. In the same way millions of westerners slowly poison their own bodies in order to escape. They end up in AE with a pipe up their arse having their system flushed and repeat the whole charade the following weekend.

If you want to stop these symptoms from occurring, then break the cage. Repeal some drug laws (cannabis, mescaline & ecstasy for starters), repeal some road-traffic laws (almost too many to list, but basically anything that doesn't affect the safety of other road users), repeal some health & safety laws (again, leave only the laws which affect the safety of others), change some property laws (nonsensical liability legislation), get rid of mobile CCTV units (oh yes Johnny foreigner, we actually have them here). Lead by example and say "fuck political correctness". We have to somehow end the culture of relying the government to do things for us; legislation is not an adequate substitution for conflict resolution.

Some of the points above should help us on the road to weening people from the teat of government protection and tackling the root cause of some of the social problems we face today.

Why impose a time limit at all?


Because things change over time. To make something static in an environment of constant change and innovation prohibits flexibility, adaptability, portability, and overall progression.

Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval:

I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the same coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Probably not in the context as the OP put it. But more a general sense of law.

I still think it makes more sense to review a law once circumstances have changed than to impose an arbitrary time limit. We struggle with insane amounts of bureaucracy as it is, the one thing we don't need is a system which creates more unnecessary parliamentary process. If a law is either not achieving what it was designed to do or is even having a negative effect then it should be amended or scrapped anyway, whether it's been in place for 10 years or 200. If a time limit is introduced it will encourage laws to be used experimentally, which would make me very nervous . A law should be based on solid principals and solid evidence, rather than on an implement-and-observe basis.

If a time limit is introduced it will encourage laws to be used experimentally, which would make me very nervous .

Laws are already used experimentally. $700 Billion Bailout... Military Commissions Act... this coming year, all TV signals are to be digital so the Federal Government can sell the previous frequencies that were being used... these are just naming the current ones. The biggest one would be all the law legislated during the interim Iraqi Government the US and UK installed after Saddam's collapse. Every law that ran through there were geared toward the largest experiment ever conducted to test conditions for the idea of a Free Market.

Regarding the bailout; it's not like the government has a choice but to experiment. In this case inaction could well be more detrimental than untested solutions. Why do you say the Military Commissions Act and the switch to digital TV signals are experimental? They seem pretty permanent to me. In the case of the digital TV signals, surely all the experimenting has been done in the lab, and the lawmakers have been presented with concrete findings to base their legislation on?. In saying "solid principals and solid evidence" I was more answering the original example about laws designed to combat age-old social problems as opposed to new problems.

Although is this even the issue? If laws today are commonly used experimentally, is that something you are comfortable with?


The biggest one would be all the law legislated during the interim Iraqi Government the US and UK installed after Saddam's collapse. Every law that ran through there were geared toward the largest experiment ever conducted to test conditions for the idea of a Free Market.

Shock testing economics is a different issue to law making.

If laws today are commonly used experimentally, is that something you are comfortable with?


Not really. All I can really do is stay on top of it. Unless people in this country start caring about what their government actually does, the government is pretty much given the free will to do anything. The only time this country actually cared about what the government was doing was when that Immigration Reform came up for a vote. Not the numerous bills about dipping into social security or the fairness doctrine or executive orders declaring what constitutes a time when the Executive can declare martial law... I guess unless it has something to do with brown people taking all the bathroom cleaning and lawn mowing jobs, people of this country just don't care. :(