Posted by
Andrews on Monday, June 02, 2008 4:45:12 PM
Recently in
replying to a comment, I was struck by the fact that people often make a fetish of irrelevant things. As with
my last article, where the author made such a fetish of poverty that he ascribed happiness to a man's impoverished circumstances, there are people who think that certain traits or attributes are of such paramount importance that they ignore perfectly valid options because of this irrelevant trait.
While replying to yt_knight's comments on the FairTax I realized that he is not unique in this, his specific fascination, the obsession with simplicity, is fairly widespread one. And not just among those who endorse the FairTax, though most FairTax supporters seem to share it, but among many who follow politics. It has become an article of faith among many segments that simplicity is somehow a valuable trait.
And in the abstract this sounds plausible, at least until we look at some specific examples.
First, let us look at the electoral college. This is a cumbersome system. Every ten years we need a census. We then use that census to assign electors, and then have individual state elections where the state winner gets all the electors. Those electors then meet and vote for the president. Would not a system of direct popular vote for president be more simple? Yet would it be better?
Or, leaving our nation and era, let us look at the election of a doge in Venice. The whole system was designed to both ensure the doge was selected by specific noble families, but also so that no one of the families had undue influence on the selection. The process appears crazy to an outsider with electors being reduced by lot, voting for other panels of electors, who are also reduced by lot, and so on, until a doge is selected. Yet, the end result was what was desired. No single family ever obtained a lock on the office of doge. Nor did Venice develop dueling leading families like the Orsini and Colonna in Rome. For all its complications, it worked.
And that is my point. Simplicity is nice, it is fine if a law is simple enough to be understood by the man on the street, but it does not have to be that simple to work. Sometimes complexity is required, sometimes we have to abandon simplicity to achieve our goals.
Now, I did not write this to beat up yt_knight. He simply provided the impetus to write on a topic I have long thought of addressing. The FairTax fixation on simplicity is only the most recent manifestation of this idea. Many political movements have campaigned against complexity.
And when it is needless complexity, then they may be right. There is no need to make simple things complex. But usually, as with the FairTax, they take it too far, and campaign against all complexity. And while there is no need to make the simple complex, there is no way to make the complex simple, and trying to apply only "simple" solutions to all of life's problems more often than not results in applying the wrong solution instead.
Simplicity is good when it can be achieved without sacrifice, but it is not a universal, absolute good. There are times when trying to apply only simple solutions results in a "one size fits all" approach that results in more harm than a more complex answer would.