Pirate Wheel Principles: Quality Legislation

Quality Legislation is one of the eight spokes on The Pirate Wheel. It says that we take pride in the quality of our work.

Making coherent, internally consistent laws is hard work. All too frequently, laws are internally contradictory and left to the courts to sort out. In contrast, we set a high quality bar for what we produce. All laws must adhere to four quality criteria:

Necessity. The law must target an identified problem that it in the public interest to solve through legislation. (This is in contrast to a special interest complaining, or a problem that should not be solved legislatively.) The problem must be identified by ways of real, sourced numbers rather than comparative adjectives like “less”, “more” or “worse”.

Effectiveness. The proposed legislative solution must solve the identified problem according to multiple independent studies (in particular, not according to studies from special interests benefiting from the law).

Proportionality. The proposed law must not create worse problems than it purports to solve. Especially, human rights must always be respected.

Evidence basis. The law must be based on secular, independent, evidence-based studies and never on dogma of any kind.

Rights basis. The justification for any law must ultimately land in human rights, and never in dogma or morals. (As mentioned elsewhere, intellectual monopolies such as the copyright monopolies and patent monopolies are not considered rights, but rights-limiting.)

Previously existing laws that do not meet these quality criteria shall be removed.

Updated 2011-Nov-26.

Empowerment

Rule of Law (with Humanism and Diversity)
Profit Motive (with Diversity, Resilience, and Swarm Economy)