I saw a really good TED talk where the speaker argued that we have far too many laws right now: http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_howard.html

One of the few useful ideas I read in Utopia stated that (paraphrased) it's nuts to be bound by laws you cannot possibly comprehend within a year.

Makes a lot of sense to me, personally. Though I'll grant that won't happen, it's an ideal to shoot for, instead of endlessly patching problems with laws that noone can possibly comprehend the ramifications of due to the system's complexity.

A year is a long time. If it took a year to comprehend all the laws that you might be breaking, you're guaranteed to at least break some of them.

This is as opposed to the lifetime+ of our current set of laws? I'm not saying a year is a good number, just that it's a better goal to shoot for than we currently have (more laws apparently == better).

Either way, the "first" world is ripe for a revolution. The internet has opened the eyes of a lot of people to a kind of freedom and self-government that was all but forgotten. Combined with the entitlement bomb that's ticking under the entire system, something will change soon.

I'm not referring to a 70s-style revolution with public executions of the ruling class etc., but I'm predicting some radical changes in the democratic/political system. Transparency, accountability, fewer and simpler laws and significantly smaller government.

hahahahaha. Oh, you kids... :)

I hope what mseebach is predicting happens, but I do think something will eventually end up happening.

Every week it seems I hear of impossible to enforce laws trying to regulate behavior or thought. (just today, trying to make open source using countries suspect, everyone is probably a federal criminal, etc) Trying to fight technology with regulation (drm, dmca, etc). I hear misleading announcements every morning on my commute saying the police have the right to search me without cause. (They can't unless you agree, yet.)

In the past 10 years things like this seem to be escalating and technology seems to have sped it up. Loosely and with a grain of salt; Content filtering and monitoring lead to tor, unjust laws lead to the EFF and ACLU, censorship of news lead to wikileaks, etc.

People will eventually get radicalized, wont they?

Honestly I probably don't know my history very well, maybe this is just SOP for humanity, a constant back and forth.

Just do us a favor, if something does start happening and you do opt out, don't make it harder on the rest of us. ;-)

> People will eventually get radicalized, wont they?

Young people get radicalized. Then they get married, have kids, get a career, get debts, etc. Radicalness over. People eventually sell-out, cop-out, or join up. They rarely stay radicalized.

That is SOP for humanity at least last 80 years or so that I know about.

Then there are the times when otherwise solidly middle class people become radicalised by financial hardship and capricious and unfair actions of government and financial institutions. When the stable productive core of society is getting dislocated from it's niche and starts to see it's relatively moderate level of privilege erode; that is when you get transformational violence across broad sectors of society.

If you want to argue historical examples, both the french revolution and the rise of fascism in Europe followed this pattern.

In italy, we use to say: "Made a law, made a deception", which means that for every law there's almost always a way to get around it.