While this may be a little tangential to the normal run of posts here, to me managing regulatory risk is one of the things that any good risk manager has to do. Understanding the abilities and restrictions that the law has is an important part of that.

Over the last few months I have been putting the occasional post up here on what I feel is wrong with a lot of the regulatory framework. Skepticlawyer, being the very good lawyer she is, has done it better.

Legislation has two limits. One is practical (call it a ‘means-end’ limit). The other is principled (call it a ‘normative’ limit). Most philosophers spend all their time arguing over the latter: John Stuart Mill’s ‘harm principle‘ represents an attempt to get at what a principled limit on the powers of legislation may look like. This is philosophically interesting and forms a major part of my DPhil thesis here at Oxford. In the case of conservatives and social democrats, however, both groups engage in major legal wish-fulfillment: they think they can ignore ‘means-end’ limits. That is, they seem to think that passing a law will make it so. If wishes were horses, people, beggars would ride. They think they will, for example, be able to make abortion illegal (or greatly restrict access to it) with no social or economic comeback, or impose salary caps on business executives without hemorrhaging talent overseas or to other industries.

This is in the context of a piece on the Left in Australia – but the second half of the piece goes on to more general issues and it is this section of the post I would encourage you to read. It starts at the third paragraph after the blockquote

in her piece.