Law: Known and Certain

Hayek argues that one of the criteria law ought to have is that is be know and certain. The law also should not be rapidly changing. As it effects people and commerce it should not be chancing from day to day. Case and point, the Alaska tax system on oil and gas seems to change every few years. As someone who has designed excel sheets and discounted future cash flows to present with taxation considered, having a tax system change every few years really messes up the model and makes it difficult to make positive economic decisions.

How much certainty is there in US law? The amount of certainty must surely be directly inversely proportional to the number of trail lawyers per capita. I mean if the law where so certain everyone would settle their disputes before they got to court, and in a case of criminal trails, if the law was very certain there would be no point in having a lawyer cause it would have no impact on the outcome. I will admit if the amount of cases that never get to court relative to the amount that do may be a better measure of certainty of the law, but I propose that it is much easer to gather data on the number of trail lawyers per capita. It does seem to be true that if you have enough money you can get away with just about anything, and this is largely true because you can hire the best lawyer with money.

On a side note I would like to introduce the idea behind a potential constitutional amendment. First in order to incentive the government to declare war before it actually engages in acts of war, it should be illegal for it to borrow money in any shape or form in time of peace. In other words, to run a deficit budget, the government must first be in a declared state of war. I believe this would solve the problems we have been having since world war 2, the problem of the government engaging in acts of war, on numerous instances, under Republicans and Democrats, with out first declaring war like our highest law states it must.

Next, to discourage war, in times of war a universal draft would automatically be but in place for all able bodied personnel. The first to be drafted would be the closest family members of the congress. Also they would be put into the most dangerous position in the war.

Problems we face: we fight to many wars, we break our law by not declaring war, and our government spends to much. If you agree these are problems you should entertain the idea of the previously mentioned constitutional amendments.

I still have to wonder, if your government so blatantly for the last 60 plus years failed to declare war with no penalty, what enforcement do we have if our government deficit spends with out declaring war? Also what happens if all the congressmen and womens sons and daughters magically get medically disqualified for service in times of war?