[quote="Diderot Mirabeau":fd9i3wdt]Thanks for your reply. Unsurprisingly, I do not agree entirely with the opinion you advance. I base my disagreement on the observation that we seem to use different yardsticks by which to judge the performance of our elected representatives:
With the danger of misrepresenting your position I submit that I place the main emphasis on ensuring that our elected representatives are part of and in touch with the needs of the community and keen to preserve that connection by ensuring that legislative acts do not reach a level of complexity where they serve to alienate or confuse the elctorate.[/quote:fd9i3wdt]
One cannot look at the complexity of the wording of any piece of legislation in isolation from the function that it must perform: indeed, the wording of any given piece of legislation is just one tiny component of an entire system, part of which forms any given function. The issue is therefore not as simple as you represent it to be. The questions that need to be asked are these:
(1) what exactly is the function that needs to be served; and
(2) what is the best way of serving that function?
The yardstick by which a legislature should be judged is how well that it answers both of those questions in the form of legislation. Question (1) is, ultimately, about choosing what government ought to do. That is what is usually meant by a question of "policy": how high do we want our land fees? Do we want to expand to another sim with a different theme, or do we want to make our existing sims larger by adding contiguous islands? What should we do to encourage commerce? Those are all policy questions, and it is issues of policy that occupy most manifestos during most elections. It is on issues of policy that the legislature needs to be able to communicate directly with citizens (mainly at election times, but also at other times).
Question (2) is about workability. "We will expand Colonia Nova by adding another contiguous, Roman-themed sim" may be a sensible policy, but, if one goes about buying a third sim before the CDS has enough money to support it, the policy, as implemented, is unworkable. A legislature that provided in its legislation for the acquisition of a third sim before the CDS had enough money to pay for it would undoubtedly be a failed legislature. Actually working out when we have enough money may be not in the least a simple task: it may (and, in fact, probably will) take somebody with Sudane's level of accountancy expertise to make an accurate prediction of that time. The process of making that deduction is not something that most citizens will be able to understand: I certainly would not have a clue. It is also not a process in which most citizens are likely to be in the least interested, providing that the calculation is correct, which is easily measured by results.
In general, on the policy-formation level, there are many cases (of which the sim purchasing scenario given above is but one example) in which, whilst it is both possible and desirable to have the general policy on the matter (we want another Roman themed sim annexed to Colonia Nova) as something with which all citizens can, with very little trouble indeed, become fully engaged, many of the details of implementation and workability-assurance must be left to those (1) with special expertise in the matter (such as Sudane); and (2) who have time to do detailed and technical work (such as making arithmetical calculations) without which there is great danger of the project going wrong, and in the details of which most citizens in any event have little interest provided that things are done properly. Can you really imagine, for example, ten or fifteen citizens having long debates in a subforum called "Accountancy discussion" about precisely when we should be able to afford a new sim, and which of three or four accountancy methods (each popular in different first-life nations) should be adopted to reach that conclusion? If we restrict ourselves to doing only those things that can fully be understood by everyone with minimal effort, we restrict ourselves to doing virtually nothing (even building, after all, is not fully understood by everyone).
That is the participation issue: the second is the workability issue. You seem to imply that detailed legislation is unworkable: in fact, the opposite is true. Again, one must think of the legislation as a single component of a larger, overall system. The question is not "how easy is this bit of legislation to understand?" but "how easy is it to understand the workings of this system overall to the extent that I need to understand it to achieve whatever I am trying to achieve by using this system?". Legislation creates rules, and sets of rules, operating in conjunction with each other, create systems. Those positive systems then have to interact in particular ways with naturally occurring systems to achieve whatever aims that were sought to be achieved when the legislation was written in the first place. With a judicial system, for example, the aim is simply stated but inordinately complicated to achieve: to have a fair, binding, enforceable means of resolving disputes in accordance with law. How, exactly, to go about doing that is a question not unlike deciding when we can afford a second sim: i.e., very difficult, and best answered by those who have particular expertise in the subject matter.
More than that, the inherent complication of the task at hand (even working out precisely what fairness entails is inordinately complicated, as is apparent to anybody who has ever tried to do it) means that it is impossible to have, simultaneously, rules that are (1) expressed in few words and are easy to read; and (2) are easy to apply in a just and consistent manner that, in fact, achieves the objectives that one seeks to achieve in the first place. So, saying, "We shall have rules written in few words that are easy to read" entails simultaneously having rules that are hard to apply in practice, tend to give capricious results, are unpredictable, and do not achieve what they are there to achieve.
If, therefore, the concern is to create a system overall that, in practice, does not confuse or alienate, having rules written in few words and that are easy to read as the only guide is not going to succeed in that aim, since the system that they create will be confusing, unpredictable, difficult to understand and unjust. That itself will serve to confuse and alienate people. What is important is the function of the rules, not just the text in which they are written: what people care about is whether they are going to get a fair trial, or whether they are going to have sufficient redress against those who wrong them (for example) than how pleasant a job that it is reading the rules. We are creating rules to serve a practical function, not to serve as a work of literature.
I pause here to observe a critical distinction that many of the advocates of purely textual simplicity do not always appreciate: it is, of course, undesirable to have the text [i:fd9i3wdt]more[/i:fd9i3wdt] loquacious and florid than its function truly requires. That is the principle of parsimony (sometimes called "occum's razor"), and nobody disputes it. If one can write [i:fd9i3wdt]the same thing[/i:fd9i3wdt] in a way that is shorter and easier to understand, without losing one shred of the meaning, and without being one bit less precise, then, unless the intended audience prefers the aesthetic of one over another, and can understand both equally well, there is no argument to have the longer or more difficult one. That, of course, is fundamentally distinct from criticising a passage of text in legislation, not because it is needlessly loquacious, but because its function requires that it be long and complicated to the extent that it is. The only criticism of such a passage could be that that function is not a desirable function to have at all. Merely calming that it is "too complicated", without offering any suggestion as to how the same function can be performed with any less complication, is not a meaningful criticism at all, any more than it is to claim that your computer is "too complicated", and insisting that Microsoft come up with a way of running Windows XP on your pocket calculator. As Einstein said, "everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler". If one removes any given function from a system, with the pretext of simplifying it, then there is a very great risk that, unless the function truly was superfluous, its removal will destabilise the system and make it unreliable, and thus far harder to use, more confusing, and tending more to alienate.
I summary, I think, we agree (1) on the principle of parsimony; (2) that things should not be needlessly confusing; and (3) that things should, in so far as is possible, not be structured so that they tend to alienate people. What it seems we disagree on is just how to go about doing that; you seem to focus on the text alone, whereas my argument has always been that it is the system in practice that counts.
[quote:fd9i3wdt]I support this opinion with reference to the fact that our community of 65+ is in fact no larger than a houseowners' association the aggregate internal rules of which are often able to be reproduced on a few sheets of paper in plain language understandable by anyone. In contrast, you seem in my view for your assessment to want to place the emphasis on achieving a professional government comparable to the standards of their real life counterparts.[/quote:fd9i3wdt]
My point always has been that it is what we seek to do, not the number of people who are, for the time being, citizens that should shape how professional or amateurish that our institutions need to be. Doing accountancy or law properly does not get any easier, or less important, merely because there are few people to or about whom to administer it.
[quote:fd9i3wdt]The positions are not necessarily irreconcilable I believe. As illustrated by the Simplicity Party manifesto (soon to be published in a slightly revised form) different legislative domains may well engender different priorities for the legislative process. For example in the commercial domain it may well be justified to place a certain emphasis on rulemaking being inspired by experts so as to eliminate uncertainties and make the best possible use of established wisdom within SL commerce and entrepreneurship. However, when it comes to legislating in relation to the affairs of citizens and our community it is my firm conviction that we have to accept the fact that every citizen is indeed the best expert on how to conduct his own affairs.[/quote:fd9i3wdt]
A number of problems emerge here. Firstly, there is no clear distinction between a commercial and non-commercial sphere: many rules need to operate in both, not least the basic constitutional framework in which all rules operate, but also things such as the law of contract, which affect consumers and producers equally. How do you propose to distinguish these things, if at all? Secondly, you conflate the concept that every citizen is the best expert on how to conduct her or his own affairs (which is undoubtedly true, at least for the most part), and the fact that, where the law rightly intervenes is exactly in those places where the matter is not merely a matter of a person conducting her or his own affairs. In matters that are accurately described as merely the affairs of one or another individual, the law ought not intervene at all: where it does intervene, therefore, providing that that principle is respected, there is necessarily something more than the individual affairs of citizens at stake, and the argument is therefore irrelevant. What the rules on the burden and standard of proof, or the disclosure of evidence in court cases, for example, should be, cannot meaningfully be described as a matter of citizens' individual affairs. It is precisely in the resolution of conflict between otherwise irreconcilable views by citizens about how their affairs should be ordered that it is people other than those citizens who need to be making decisions about what should happen.
[quote:fd9i3wdt]If such expertise does not entail the ability or patience to read lengthy, legislative texts crafted using a high degree of professional legal terminology and sentence structure then it is the latter that must be sacrificed in order to maintain the ideal of a connectedness and good faith relationship between the electorate and their representatives.[/quote:fd9i3wdt]
You set up an inaccurate representation of conflicting ideals here. It is not, as you suggest, a question of balancing, on the one hand, having lengthy legislative texts crafted to a "high degree of professional legal terminology and sentence structure" (whatever that means, exactly), for its own sake, and on the other, connectedness and good faith between the citizens and the legislature: since, if the citizens want any given policy at all (and one cannot really dispute that the citizens want a fair justice system), it necessarily follows that they want (or, at least, should be taken to want) that system to work properly. Respecting, in good faith, the wishes of the electorate, therefore, often, as described above, entails creating systems that cannot help but be complicated in operation, but whose operation can be made far easier to understand and predict, far fairer, and far closer to its original intention, by having well written, detailed, precise rules, which may be hard to read by the uninitiated, but do not make the system overall any harder to understand than the muddle that vague rules would create; indeed, quite the converse. Detailed rules are not there for the sake of people being able to say, "look what lovely rules we have", but to be used; what needs to be balanced on your scale, therefore, is not having "lengthy, legislative texts crafted using a high degree of professional legal terminology and sentence structure" in the abstract, but the functional effect of precise drafting, which is a workable system. Indeed, if precise drafting did not create any better system than vague drafting, it would, because of the principle of parsimony outlined above, be a positively absurd exercise to engage in even attempting to make it precise because, of course, making something precise takes a great deal more work than does making it vague.
So, the things that ought inform the outcome of your weighing scales are (1) whether precise drafting does, in fact, create a more workable system than vague drafting; and (2) whether, nonetheless, there is some benefit to the citizens of having vague rules that outweighs the benefit to workability of precisely drafted rules. If the answer to question (1) is in the negative, then the matter is resolved there and then, for there is simply no point in trying to make anything precise at all. If, however, the answer to question (1) is in the affirmative, then it would take a very strong reason indeed to outweigh the importance of doing whatever one is trying to do in the first place as well as one can do it. My view of the matter certainly is that, if something is worth doing at all, it is worth doing properly, even if it takes more effort than doing a shoddy job of it.
[quote:fd9i3wdt]I will acknowledge the input of a legal expert - and indeed of anyone - to run through a legislative proposal with a mental checklist and suggest additional issues, which may need addressing but as a politician I would never in the circumstances implied by the foreseeable future of the CDS allow the same individual to actually go ahead and draft the wording of the text save for minor sentences.[/quote:fd9i3wdt]
What do you mean by "allow" here? Nothing in the constitution (or anything else) stops anybody from drafting a bill and submitting it to the legislature; if the legislature thinks, having read it and considered it, that it is a good bill, why should they not adopt it?
[quote:fd9i3wdt]I am sorry but I cannot see how you could entertain such a thought from reading my contribution...[/quote:fd9i3wdt]
Perhaps it was your use of the word "allow". What form of prohibition had you in mind, then?
[quote:fd9i3wdt]1) I was explicitly refering to "monolithic omnibus bills" championed by "unafiliated maverick citizens."[/quote:fd9i3wdt]
This is all very vague. What, precisely, makes a bill "monolithic" or an "omnibus" bill? What, precisely, makes any given citizen a "maverick"? And with what do you think that citizens (or perhaps just maverick citizens) ought be affiliated before they should be allowed to draft these "monolithic omnibus bills"?
