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Notes -
New executive order just dropped.
This seems, on first glance, wildly better by my libertarian sensibilities than anything I ever expected out of the Trump administration. I am slightly in shock, which is not unusual following an EO, but this time it is a good shock, which is unusual.
So a couple of things
I certainly did not have "total formalist victory" on my agenda. What the hell.
This will probably end up fizzling out, but having a well defined list of all crimes is a good principle. It's what the law is supposed to be in the first place. Some seem to think that ambiguity is the necessary font of power. It's not. It's the font of a certain kind of power. One that America, a top 10 laywers per capita country, scarcely needs more of.
Down with foxes, up with the lion.
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Almost all regulatory complexity is the result of closing loopholes lawyers found in earlier, simpler regulation. Congratulations to them, because all the legal specialists in each regulatory area will be poring over any new, ‘simplified’ regulation with the religious fervour of a leading Talmudic scholar to find out exactly what is implicitly allowed until enough bad news comes out that the current regime is restored.
Take two of the regulatory and legal standards that libertarians hate most - the definition of tax evasion and the definition of wire fraud. Detractors are completely correct that both are extremely vague (the former is essentially ‘anything that violates the spirit of paying your fair share of taxes’ and the second is ‘lying about anything that might lead to any gains for yourself through any medium of communication’), but their vagueness is largely organic and downstream from the fact that any stricter standards would make the enforcement of the rules pointless because any intelligent lawyer or other actor could rules-lawyer their way out of it.
Any standard of tax evasion or anti-bribery law or anti-corruption enforcement regime that does not effectively rely on ‘the spirit of the law’ (a thousand year old standard in common law anyway) is doomed to fail. This was the big tax revolution for rich people in the 90s, by the way. All those articles about how ‘despite top tax rates being 70/80/90% in the 1960s, rich people actually didn’t pay very much tax at all’ are true. What changed tax from something nobody smart paid to something most rich people pay at least some of (even if you disagree with how much) was an IRS (and other national tax agencies) that had the power to go after people solely for spirit of the law type violations.
Does this EO touch either of those? I am pretty sure that crimes of wire fraud already require mens rea, unless someone has invented exciting new forms of emergent autonomous wire fraud recently.
That said, the other regulatory standard that libertarians hate the most is KYC/AML, and those do seem to me like they fall squarely in the crosshairs of this EO. Those are the primary reason I'm tentatively excited/optimistic about this order.
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