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Old 12-01-2007, 12:12 AM
Howard Treesong Howard Treesong is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2004
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Default Re: Ask Howard Treesong About Law or Lawyering

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Howard, how much of current US legal system is unnecessary? For instance, the complexity of the tax code creates the need for complex tax shelter, etc. If they simplified the tax code, they could avoid a lot of the tax legal system probably without giving up too much (at least in some places). So would you agree that our society would not be much worse off if we simplified our legal system in some ways? If so, what ways would that be and how much of it do you think could be simplified?

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Being a libertarian nutter, I'm right with you here. The tax code is horrifically complicated; federal acquisition regulations (called "FAR") are perhaps as bad. They're dense, abstract, onerous and ambiguous. I don't know the overall costs for compliance with these and other regulations except to say that the number is massive -- and much of it the senseless result of partisan politics.

One anecdote, however, illustrates the idiocy of government regulation. In its wisdom, the FDA implemented a regulation saying that juice manufacturers could claim "no sugar added" on their products so long as the added sugar wasn't cane sugar. My client promptly started buying grapes and stripping them down to raw sugar and adding that. Voila! From a health perspective, my understanding was that grape juice concentrate is no different than cane sugar, and it was certainly no different from a taste perspective. But the stuff could then be marketed entirely differently. Taste and health profile was the same, but the cost was quite a bit higher.

I got involved because the client needed a southern-hemisphere source of grapes to ensure a year-round supply, and entered into a contract with an Argentinian company. The Argentine guys then promptly defrauded my client out of many millions of dollars and shipped product that was fermented. Litigation and many amusing war stories ensued.

I have no idea how to quantify the problem, however -- and this is just a tiny, tiny example.
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