This is what I don't get; why? I get that laws aren't repealed as often as they should be. My personal suspicion is that it's a lack of political will. I'm not from the US, I don't know that much about the political system. I imagined that repealing a law would be a matter of passing a bill, same as making one. Is this assumption wrong?
That's correct.
> This is what I don't get; why
Why doesn't matter. What matters is whether it's true, because it's silly to act as if things are different, and what you're going to do about it.
> My personal suspicion is that it's a lack of political will.
Laws have beneficiaries. For example, someone is collecting that mohair subsidy. Those folks are quite motivated to keep things the way they are. The folks who would benefit from killing ths subsidy are diffuse - they don't even know that they're paying it.
Plus, legislators get rewarded for doing "new" things, not for fixing old ones that no one remembers.
That's why my "must be renewed every so often" proposal requires more and more effort to pass each time (approaching some limit). The longer that something has been around, the more popular it should be if it's actually worthwhile.
Actually, they don't. Almost every vehicle, including those fresh off the lot, will fail an inspection by someone who wants to find a problem.
> The more stable these laws are, the easier it is to know what they say. This proposition makes them less stable.
You're assuming that this change will significantly affect people's ability to know the law. It doesn't - they're already ignorant AND the law mutates enough as it is.
> So repeal bad laws.
It's almost impossible to repeal things. The US still has a mohair subsidy from WWI.
> That sounds like a better idea than presuming that all laws are bad and repealing them automatically.
I'm not presuming that all laws are bad. I'm proposing a mechanism for getting rid of bad and obsolete laws that has some chance of actually working.
We don't elect legislators for life, so why should the default for laws be "forever"?