God gave Moses only ten rules.  But now, we are drowning in a complex maze of political and economic regulations that cede power to the government.

God gave Moses only ten rules.  That’s a great example of using simple rules for a complex world.  

The title of today’s podcast comes from a 1998 book I used in a class many years ago.  I keep thinking about it, as the regulatory environment gets more restrictive.  Richard Epstein’s point was that simple rules are better.  The original Social Security Act of 1935 contained 32 pages.  The Affordable Care Act of 2010, known as Obamacare, ran just over 900 pages, with an estimated 20,000 pages of explanatory regulations.  

The IRS code is just over 2500 pages, and the supporting rules run to over 9,000 pages.  When you call the IRS, they give you the wrong advice 20% of the time.  This complex set of rules favors the legislators.  They are able to hand out tax deductions to groups they like, who help them get elected. 

The National Football League is a good example of having too many rules.  They now have a fourth TV announcer, who is a rules specialist.  That’s an indication there are too many rules.

Back to the book by Epstein.  He makes a good point: Simpler laws are better.  Complex laws contain all kinds of carve-outs and hand-outs for lobbyists, which moves power to them.  He actually shows a simple two-dimensional graph with a bell curve. He uses the number of lawyers on the X-axis, but you could also use the number of laws.  Lawyers are those who keep laws.  OK.  Production is the vertical, Y axis.  With no laws, production is low.  People don’t want to produce something if the state won’t defend their private ownership of it.  As the number of protective laws increases, people are more productive.  But, much like the Laffer curve, production tops out, then starts to dwindle, as the number of laws and lawyers increases.  In America, we’re clearly on the back side of the bell curve, where each law and lawyer we add, decreases Gross Domestic Product.

This overly constrictive legal environment is not only a violation of justice, but it also throws the economy out of whack.  Labor spent investigating meaningless violations of finicky laws is not a good use of labor.  The investigator would create more value for society by doing something else that creates more value.  And, money paid in bribes increases the cost of doing business and creates inflationary pressure for consumers. 

 

Biblical Economic Policy

Sergiy Saydometov and I wrote the book by this title, because we searched the landscape of the Christian Economic literature, and we couldn’t find evidence of anyone doing a systematic theology on the subject.  There are many of these, but I tend to like the one by Wayne Grudem.  Instead of just pulling out one verse like, “Whose face is on the coin?” Systematic Theology attempts to look at the Bible and categorize the many teachings into a few, basic concepts.  God gave Moses only ten rules, so we followed that pattern and produced what we call Ten Biblical Commandments of Economics.   The one that has the best application to today’s subject is #10 Honor Those in Power.  We are Biblically commanded to do this, but the assumption is that the laws are rooted in some form of justice.  As the laws become more complex, they create more space for corruption.

 

Anarcho-Tyranny

In an article in the Epoch Times recently, Jeffrey Tucker explained the phrase “Anarcho-Tyranny.”  Ok,