Milk has an expiration date. Your drivers’ license has an expiration date. Heck even my life insurance policy has an expiration date. Yet most legislation does not come with an expiration date. Ironically, it seems that any legislation that potentially reduces the size and scope of government does come with an expiration date (e.g. the Bush Tax Cuts) but I don’t see a lot of pressure to have expiration dates on much of anything else. Imagine if the Fed had an expiration date, or the FCC, the FDA, or any of the thousands of rules that are handed down by the bureaucrats.
Even if you believe many such rules would be good things, the existence of an expiration date would require a regular visitation of the rules to see if they are cost-effective, just and sensible. Furthermore given the fact that thousands of rules would have to come up for discussion, it would promote the creation of Simpler Rules. And that is something we should all prefer.
In Missouri, there is a bill that would cause all rules (not laws) to expire after ten years. It is difficult to have a rule making, since all parties that are affected get to have a hand in crafting it.
+1. I have long thought that a constitutional amendment (otherwise, implementation would be “doc fixed”) to require laws to expire (every 10 years, at max?) would be a genuinely useful solution to bad laws that never get repealed or changed. I hadn’t considered the simplification benefit, but that seems likely, as well (I had considered, that it would keep legislators busy, maybe reducing new laws).
As Keynes said, “In the long run, we all have an expiration date.”
As WC has often pointed out, we are taxed and regulated at federal, state, county, and local levels. Inch by inch, we lose our freedom, and I am hard pressed to identify any local ordinance, even ours, that has ever been rolled back, including our ordinance regulating backyard hot dog and s’mores campfires. So far we have no police to handcuff the fathers making fires for the Brownies, but there are Draconian fines for resisting the will of the Supervisors, if they do not like you, because you are an Islamophobe or a denier of international climate theology.