Lately I’ve been seeing articles regarding the interaction of “527 groups” and the national committees of the Democratic and Republican parties. Most of these involve alleged association of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth with the Republican Party, and associations such as MoveOn.org with the Democratic party.

Just to satisfy my curiosity, I tried to find out just what these “independent” groups can and can’t do with regards to the law, and I was flummoxed. Here is 26 USC 527, the portion of the Internal Revenue code that deals with independent political organizations. Now, I consider myself a fairly well-educated person who knows English pretty well, and the only thing I can determine is that the creation of a 527 group affects how the government taxes the contributions that a group collects. My web browser tries to explain this in 24 screens @ 1480 x 1050 — more verbose than necessary, don’t you think?

One of the employees that I trained during the last couple of days used to be a legal secretary, who understood my frustration, and during that conversation, it hit me: The U.S. legal system today, is similar to pre-Reformation Canon Law. Before the Reformation, all Biblical documents, commentaries, etc., were either in Hebrew, Latin, or Greek. In Europe, the knowledge of these languages was limited to monks and priests, and the local people had to rely on the priest to determine what Scripture actually read. It was impossible to know the law, much less keep it (religious free-will discussions aside! :) ).

I’ve tried googling for statistics to see how much the Code has grown over the last 200 years, with little success, but I don’t think there’s any argument that we are consistently seeing a steady increase in the number of laws. As the number of laws increase, it becomes impossible to know the law. Moreover, these laws, like our 527 example, have to be so verbose so that amoral people, who don’t know or don’t care what is actually “stealing” and “lying”, for example, still have a guideline for behavior. How do I know I’m breaking the law, until some law enforcement official slaps the cuffs on me? The law is now so obfuscated that we have to rely on our new generation of popes and priests, judges and lawyers, to tell us what the law says.

It would seem that the Founding Fathers’ principle that “that government is best which governs least” has been thoroughly discarded, by the big political parties. I submit this is because it is not within our representatives’ area of incentive! That’s a topic for another day. :)