> I'm not sure the current approach is long-term viable.

If your long-term is long enough, you're guaranteed to be correct...

Putting that aside, even if you think your 'big change' is right and prudent and will Make Things Better, other people have their own plans. Now, unless you get rid of popular representation, you have legal hysteresis, and everyone's planning horizon lasts until the Next Big Change. Suddenly nobody's building nothing.

So you're left with a mess or an authoritarian government. Resistance to wild swings is actual conservatism at work, and is a very good thing.

> elected officials have an extremely strong bias to adding/amending versus repealing/scaling back

I find this to be a crippling problem of how politics works in modern democracies.

Taxes are a great example, because almost every country will increase it, but never decrease it. They’ll think of a 100 new ways to extract taxes, but never remove outdated ones.

Not necessarily. 50s / 60s US income tax is much, much higher than current rate. I just think the cycle of going up and down is extremely long.

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_Margina...

This is where supportability comes into play: a short time after the was people understood the need for such measure, today you would have a revolution for such a tax level. In 20 years it will come back, no worries, people will love it.

The top rates were much higher but few people actually paid those high rates due to loopholes.

These days people are paying more in real terms in aggregate.

I’m not sure about that either —- there were no tax havens back then. It’s so much easier since 80s to work around the tax system with off shore companies (granted it is getting harder for the past decade)

Or was I unaware the widespread loophole back in the old days?

Not so much a loophole, but back in the 50s all kinds of income were treated the same which meant you could write off your income against your investment losses.

I think it's naive to assume that rich Americans back then weren't working the system. If it was so great, why do we tax different kinds of income differently now?

I have always believed that the majority of the complexity in the tax code is derived from lobbying by special interests to lower taxes on their specific sort of income.

Lately though it seems like tax filing companies have been the ones primarily responsible for sustaining the complexity of the tax code - though whenever someone's particular benefit comes up that group tends to get pretty vocal (i.e. exemptions for SALT taxes and home owner/child credits)

Very true: my personal solution is to shop for better countries. There's no way to meaningfully influence the government's overreach. Hopefully this will become a trend and the cheapest countries will attract better talent.

> Hopefully this will become a trend and the cheapest countries will attract better talent.

Hrm, I disagree. I think the most beneficial countries will attract better talent. Having a low tax bill doesn't mean much if I need to pay for things privately.

I also personally emigrated from the US owing to the fact that healthcare there is immoral and it felt like (about a decade ago when I left) the country was on the path to major unrest. I've been quite happy up here in Canada where I pay more taxes but get to work with people who aren't burdened down by the stress of untreated health issues.

UN, WHO, WEF, WTO, and more... Where will you shop to as these unelected organizations gradually ascend?

> I'm not sure the current approach is long-term viable.

Can anyone of the downvoters say a few words? To me this seems both obvious and non-partisan. What we're doing is accruing ever more laws, creating a centuries-old legal code base without ever removing technical debt. This seems unwise.

(I wasn't a downvoter but sure)

Law isn't a simple practice due to the breadth of subjects it covers - but it is very simplified by the human factor. When laws are enforced they are done so after advocacy from a pair of humans and by the judgement of a human for penalty and possibly guilt (in some cases guilt is determined by a pool of jurors).

This means it's very different from programming where we have a dumb machine that is, at it's best ability, able to look at two numbers and tell you which one is bigger. When it comes to software edge cases must be explicit and factors must be encodable - violations must be recognizable by an algorithm and all cases must be covered. Compare that to the law where generally there are a set of guidelines that have slowly evolved over time to cover more and more edge cases - but viewing any law ever written as completely true to the letter would be a mistake - there will always be carve outs and reasonable judgement entering the picture.

I think the main problem with criticizing the creation of more laws is that we don't currently have laws to cover every situation and it's unreasonable to think we ever will - it'd be nice to get rid of some of the stupid ones but I strongly suspect you'll see this town in Italy end up being freed from any obligations since this hereditary claim is pretty bonkers.

Lastly I might point at countries with a long continuous legal history like England which hasn't changed governments violently or due to outside influence in a loooong time. There are a lot of really crazy real estate claims there, sure - but for the day to day stuff, the laws work. The cost of training lawyers might slowly be creeping up[1] but we aren't anywhere near a critical point of being unable to apply laws. I suspect that point will never be reached and we'll just see more and more specialty in legal professions - instead of an advocate in 1820 you can now hire a lawyer specialized in watershed rights. I expect that trend to continue with specialties deepening and growing further apart just like we've seen with development. You couldn't hire an "ops" guy in the 70's - everyone was expected to be well versed in operating system configuration, interaction and most were probably expected to be familiar with design.

So, I don't think this is actually an issue at quite the level you mentioned - but I do think it's one of these slowly creeping growth factors that makes us more vulnerable to societal system collapse.

1. I'd guess really slowly though since even in the US where precedent is a factor most relevant case rulings are probably from before 1870.

> This means it's very different from programming where we have a dumb machine that is, at it's best ability, able to look at two numbers and tell you which one is bigger.

And even that can get wonky. Do a search for "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic" by David Goldberg.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating-point_error_mitigatio...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_epsilon

Who else sees a software dev analogy here. Perhaps we need a law that says every 10 years we have a "sprint" to address the "technical dept" of anachronistic laws.