Posted by Ilya Somin:
Happy Birthday James Madison:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_03_15-2009_03_21.shtml#1237247017
[1]Tim Sandefur points out that today is James Madison's birthday, and
links to some of Madison's most important works. As a Property
professor, I agree with Tim that [2]Madison's "Property" is among his
best writings. But my favorite little-known Madison quote is his
warning in [3]Federalist 62 that big government undermines democratic
control over public policy by making it impossible for citizens to
acquire the knowledge they need to monitor what government is doing:
It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by
men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they
cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if
they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo
such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is
to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a
rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known,
and less fixed?
This is a point that I have focused on in much of my own work on
political ignorance (e.g. - [4]here and [5]here). Madison, however, at
least partially foresaw this danger over 200 years ago, when the
functions of government were incomparably narrower and simpler than
they are today.
References
1. http://sandefur.typepad.com/freespace/2009/03/happy-258th.html
2. http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s23.html
3. http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa62.htm
4. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=916963
5. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=457760
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