Putting your personal opinion of Stewart aside for a moment, the case prompts larger questions about the laws and regulations that govern our land: If jurors can’t understand a law well enough to determine if someone broke it, just how do lawmakers expect citizens to understand it enough to obey it? Do we really want to live in a country where good-intentioned people are required to pay high-priced attorneys to tell them whether or not they’re breaking the law?
America has too many laws, and the laws we do have are tedious, overly complex and sometimes not only impossible to understand, but impossible to comply with. Our elected officials pass laws in fits of whimsy, responding to the latest scare headlines, demands from interest groups or data from polling firms. Reason, freedom or constitutional authority rarely enter into the debate.
The federal tax code (search) today covers 17,000 pages and requires over 700 different forms. The IRS estimates Americans spend 5.1 billion hours annually merely preparing their taxes. The Tax Foundation estimates that those wasted hours drain some $194 billion annually from the U.S. economy. All of that comes before Joe Taxpayer forks over his first dime.
The federal criminal code is just as bad. Thomas Jefferson wrote that the U.S. Constitution gave Congress the power to criminally punish “treason, counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States, piracies, and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations, and no other crimes whatsoever.” Yet the federal criminal code today spans some 1,400 pages, and that’s just the “pocket edition.”
The Federal Registry (search), which records all of the regulations the federal government imposes on businesses (all of which carry the force of law), now exceeds 75,000 pages. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that merely complying with these regulations — that is, paying lawyers to keep educated on them, interpret them and implement them — costs U.S. business another $500 to $600 billion per year.
When someone, such as Martha Stewart, is accused of a federal crime, businesses then are forced to comply with subpoenas and demands from lawyers for information — all on their own dime. When the IRS goes on a fishing expedition for tax evasion, for example, it can require banks and businesses to file through millions, even billions of checks, forms, documents and e-mail to comply with an information request. The same is true for the EPA, the Department of Labor or the Department of Energy. The federal criminal code, the tax code and the Federal Registry grow thicker every year, thrusting those costs ever skyward.
