F.H. Buckley: Canada’s system of government is proving far superior to America’s http://t.co/00PyaAUoff via @fullcomment – Repeal laws hard
— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) December 5, 2014
This is a fascinating article. For those who understand how difficult it is to reverse ciizenship-based taxation, FBAR and FATCA consider the following excerpt:
“What Canada has importantly over the U.S. is reversibility, the ability to undo bad laws. That doesn’t happen so easily in America, with the gridlock built into its separation of powers, and that’s a problem Fukuyama himself has identified in two recent books that describe a sclerotic society of special interests which enact wealth-destroying laws. Once passed, Americans are stuck with bad laws. Their constitution doesn’t have a reverse gear.
What Fukuyama recognized in his recent books is James Madison’s error in The Federalist Papers. Madison argued that the separation of powers would prevent bad laws from being enacted in the first place. However, that’s an example of what Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit,” the idea that planners can anticipate all the problems that might arise with a well-drafted statute. More modestly, Canada’s parliamentary system assumes that, in a world of human fallibility, mistakes will be made, that “experts” are often unreliable, that dumb laws will be passed; and that what is more important is giving the legislator the ability to bring hindsight wisdom to bear in undoing laws which experience tells us were ill-planned. If American government has gotten too large, if the statutory code and the federal regulations have caught a case of elephantiasis, that’s not surprising. The know-it-all hubris of the planner was baked into the American constitution from the start.”
Of course, we should also remember how easy it is to pass bad laws in the first place. Many laws are simply tagged on to unrelated laws. In fact, FATCA itself was a Trojan Horse Law. In fact, as at least one U.S. politician reminds us, sometimes we:
“Have to pass the law so that we can see what’s in in it.”
U.S. laws are so complex that sometimes we have to pass the law just so that we can learn what's in it! https://t.co/H9qJluaCWw
— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) December 5, 2014
You can read the complete article referenced in he above tweet here.
