On 3/2/07, Peter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip>
You are of course assuming that the laws are perfect and consistent, and
constant. The laws are made by a few people who think that they are in a position to judge for many, and who strongly believe that they can foretell what the others will or might do in a given situation.
I don't think so at all- I just think that the laws in a democracy are usually reasonably in line with the majority of the constituents. The laws are made by people chosen to make laws. The citizens in this country chose those people to make those decisions. I don't think almost any government is perfect- just hopefully a lesser evil. -Yonah They
have been proven wrong in this by history every day since the word law was coined eons ago. It is interesting to notice that none of these wise people who predict funding, appropriations, inflation and other key parameters for months or years for a population of several millions in their legiferation are able to predict what they themselves are going to do or say or spend the very next day, even without 'interesting times' like wars or oil price hikes elsewhere throwing a wrench into the calculations. F.ex. with cars, biometric security was implemented by some, f.ex. Mercedes. As a result, recently a Mercedes was appropriated in a South-East Asian country, complete with the owner, who was needed to operate the fingerprint reader. Later the thieves got bored of lugging the owner around and chopped his finger off with a machete, tossed him out and kept the car. The story made the news. Locks are made for honest people. Making a few million people do strange things (like appearing to kiss the steering wheel or some other car part repeatedly to onlookers) to be able to drive their cars (even if technology does not play up) will not stop any fraudsters from having it their own way, just like a DNA database for the entire population will not likely help catching thieves (but may help identify them after they are caught by other means - and for this, a database spanning the entire population is not neded). One of the bigger failures of the communist totalitarian systems in Eastern Europe was the iron-clad 'five year plan' which was a blatant aberration that dictated how many pairs of shoes, loaves of bread, harvests, books, newspapers, and sick leave days a population of several millions of souls would need, five years ahead, and tried to provide for that. The enforcement of those impossible plans was a part of the terror that reigned then and there, and the fundamental reason for the frequent complete lack of basic consumer and subsistance goods (like food, soap, clothes and shoes) in those countries. Your idea of mechanizing law and taxes is a move in the same direction. One, Orwell, wrote a novel about this. The combination between inherently imperfect laws and the strong enforcement thereof (for example by full automation or by a police state) is a proven recipe for economic and social disaster. At least one country has had its tax laws implemented in a programming language (prolog). I understand that it is mostly made of heuristic rules which preempt the default 'rules'. (Links: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=41735.41750) http://www.cbbrowne.com/info/freetaxsoftware.html http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/ Note that this is not a working model, many heuristics are added and deleted every day, and the software that implements it (available in Canada for ~$20 and up or by subscription) changes every year ;-) I know nearly nothing about taxation anyway (I come from one of the handicapped countries behind the Iron Curtain so I know more about five year planned disasters). I thought that I left that behind, but now it is catching up in the form of the great jerusalem firewall (there was considerable media censorship back then). I am so thrilled. NOT. Peter
