Reason‘s Julian Sanchez has an interesting take related to a provision in a recent omnibus appropriations bill that got some bloggers overly excited recently:
To some extent, the problem is a pure function of the state’s size. The larger a government becomes, the more it presumes to dabble in economic minutiae, as F.A. Hayek famously argued, the more policy will come to steered by an unaccountable few, as the inherent complexity of the subjects of legislation immunize them from public scrutiny or debate. The insight was scarcely original to Hayek; German sociologist Robert Michels had hit on it as early as 1911 in his Political Parties, where he dubbed it “the iron law of oligarchy.” Now–especially as legislators more jealously guard their pork-dispensing prerogatives, rather than letting grant disbursing agencies fill in the details down the line–the effect of the “iron law” is so amplified that even the oligarchs (and the oligarchs among the oligarchs on the conference committees) aren’t sure what’s going on. One staffer plugs in some language downloaded from the Internet at the last minute, while another makes some handwritten adjustments to this or that dollar amount. Law is made on a darkling plain, where ignorant armies collude by night.
He goes on to suggest a useful (I suppose) reform — a mandatory cooling-off period during which bloggers and perennial anti-pork grandstanders like John McCain can pore over the minute details of hundreds of pages of legislation.
That reform is unlikely to fix the larger problem that Sanchez describes, which is the sheer scope of the national government. A massive administrative/redistributionist state offers ample opportunities for all sorts of mischief to be introduced in omnibus legislation. Personally, I’m a bit more bothered by the fact that the government mandates everything from the volume of water that can be dispensed in a single toilet flush to the size of doors on public restroom stalls than the fact a committee chairman might have had a look at my tax returns if that provision hadn’t been caught. Still, sunshine never hurts, and Sanchez’s proposal makes a lot of sense. So much sense that’s he’s right — it’ll never come to pass.