Hi, I recently discovered this forum and this is my first post.  Briefly, I am 36 years old and I have been essentially libertarian minded my entire adult life.  Unfortunately the vast majority of my family, friends and colleagues are not particularly libertarian and do not seem to even grasp an idea I have had, one which I think is very good, so I thought I would float it here and see what you folks think about this. 

I propose that the single most effective piece of legislation freedom loving Americans could possibly ever attain would be a constitutional amendment requiring that all laws, with the exception of the fed/state constitutions themselves, automatically expire after no more than ten years and earlier if so designated in the legislation itself.  The reason I believe this would be very beneficial is just about all the legislators in Washington D.C. and the States seem to do is pile more prohibitions on freedom. i.e. laws, on top of the existing ones resulting in endless laws that we the citizenry are forced to obey.

If there were an automatic expiration on all laws it would give the legislators something to do other than lobbing more new laws on top of old, and often ridiculous, past laws.  It would force them to regularly revisit every issue and regularly reaffirm if that was/is something worth doing.  History has shown legislators are often remiss to repeal past legislators actions, even when they disagree with it.  But history has also shown that not actively participating in the renewal of an expired law is something many more legislators are comfortable with.  Issues of the highest importance would be dealt with, as the cream always rises to the top, and so many of these frivolous laws would simply disappear.  I submit that here in the "Land of the Free" that if ten years is by far more than enough time to pass all the laws we will ever need and more. 

In America we just keep adding law after law after law after law (add about 30,000 more "after laws" here for a literal count).  This is done despite the fact that ignorance of the law is not a defense and I am pretty sure no one can seriously claim they know even one-tenth of the 28,000+ federal laws and all thousands of their state's respective laws.  I have seen prominent legal professionals state they had no idea of something was legal or not at first and then come back days/weeks later and say "After putting an army of lawyers on it we determined the actions of so-and-so are probably illegal so we will now take actions" and so forth.  Well excuse me but if an attorney general or a district attorney cannot even tell you if something is illegal without first putting an army of legal professional on it then how is it reasonable that regular people be aware of and obey such laws?  There are just simply too many laws.  Why on earth would ten years time for full time legislators not be far more than sufficient to adequately address any and all relevant and truly necessary issues?  There really needs to be an end game for how many laws, as laws are nothing more than prohibitions of freedom, that these people can hold the American people to. 

I would suggest the following amendment, or something substantially similar, to the federal constitution, and if that is unattainable to the various states: "With exception to this constitution, no law shall last a term exceeding ten years and no law shall be automatically renewed."  This would make them revisit all their past mistakes while still leaving ample time to deal with actual serious and relevant issues.  It might even result in so few laws that perhaps as much as 10% of the American people might be familiar with as much as half of the laws that they must obey.   Perhaps the standard of not allowing ignorance to be a defense might then actually become somewhat reasonable as well when you have 500 laws to obey and not 30,000. 

This seems like a good idea to me. Why add layer upon layer of accumulative growing government? Sunsetting would theoretically reduce the size of government, making it much harder to increase the size.

The only drawback is foresee is  that MANY more lobbyists might be hired to jam legislation down people's throats on a daily basis, which would require an extreme higher workload for lobbyists and a much higher amount of money that they would funnel to politicians if they would be effective under this sort of system.

Make sure the bill says the all in Congress must vote for the laws and not fiat pass them like the 'Slaughter Solution', every 10 years.

This seems really unnecessary. All we need is an amendment that embodies "Separation of Economy and State", in the same way and for the same reasons our forefathers wanted "Separation of Church and State"

BlackSand wrote on Mar 29^th, 2010 at 3:19pm:


Me too.