Government gives scant attention to true consequences of laws

GOVERNMENTS do not "just" make laws. They think long and hard about what they do.

They base policies on public and expert opinion, quantify problems, and quantify the probable effects of laws. Professional monitoring of costs and consequences enables them to scrap failures.

Governments are elaborate machines that extract state-of-the-art information derived from society’s best people. Measures are preceded by regulatory impact assessments (RIAs) that define and quantify problems (the "mischief principle") and predict effects, including "unintended" consequences. Governments know how affected parties, especially the poor, will be affected. Only uninformed unsophisticated people are ignorant about how efficient they are at achieving objectives, regardless of whether or not they agree with them.

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