I've told you about our country's insane and iniquitous criminal justice system for felonies and I've explained to you how municipal misdemeanor law is tantamount to a modern day debtors prison. So now it is time to focus on our corporate law. Fortunately the Economist has done the dirty work for me and boy is it dirty, 1970s Penthouse dirty. Key paragraph:
When America was founded, there were only three specified federal crimes—treason, counterfeiting and piracy. Now there are too many to count. In the most recent estimate, in the early 1990s, a law professor reckoned there were perhaps 300,000 regulatory statutes carrying criminal penalties—a number that can only have grown since then. For financial firms especially, there are now so many laws, and they are so complex (witness the thousands of pages of new rules resulting from the Dodd-Frank reforms), that enforcing them is becoming discretionary.
What happens when the law becomes objectively insane?
This is the big, obvious, frightening problem:
ReplyDelete"For financial firms especially, there are now so many laws, and they are so complex...(Dodd-Frank reforms), that enforcing them is becoming discretionary."
I believe The Economist is correct. I also believe that the ridiculous complexity of Dodd-Frank (much of which got waivers for special interests; lots of them were Democrats not GOP!) will lead to capricious and targeted enforcement. I wish they could heave the whole thing and reinstate Glass-Steagall.