If it ain’t broke, why do we keep adding more laws to fix it?

Why are Miami drivers breaking all the traffic laws? Actually, they aren’t – it’s just that everyone drives according to the laws of the place they came from.

That was funny the first time you heard it, but it points to an everyday issue, and not only on the highways. 

It’s not that we Miamians aren’t a law-abiding group, but we are buried under an outpouring of rules and laws that flood over us faster than we can read them.

The Florida Legislature annually promulgates laws governing everything from schoolbooks to health and safety, and state agencies add their own rules. Miami-Dade County legislation flows 11 months a year (the commission is on an official vacation in August). Cities, towns and villages have their own rules. So do schools, and so probably does your employer.

Who could possibly be aware of the all the laws and rules that attempt to govern Miamians who hail from everywhere on the globe? And remember, we all know that ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Yet how can you obey what you’ve never heard of?

That’s why this month’s torpedoing of a bid floated by Miami-Dade commissioners to add more restrictions on recreational boating was so welcome – and so well-reasoned by police.

Commissioners Micky Steinberg and Kevin Marino Cabrera, concerned about speeding pleasure boats in the north part of the county, asked Mayor Daniella Levine Cava to study whether restricting boating in more areas could solve the problem, and she turned to the county police Marine Patrol Unit to do the job.

After poring over citations of boaters for four years as well as accidents and total boats in the area (Miami Today detailed the study last week) the police had a simple answer: we don’t need more rules, we just need to let boaters know what the rules are today and then enforce them.

Simplistic, maybe, but practical. Tell them the rules and then make sure everyone complies.

Higher fines might help, the police said, but just let boaters know the rules and why they make sense and you reduce speeding. Then, fine the violators.

But make sure we know why a rule is needed. If we don’t see any sense, we’re not likely to comply.

Read a page from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as the New Yorker summarized it:

“Rule No. 42, the King says, is that all persons more than a mile high must leave the court. Alice counters that she isn’t a mile high. And, anyway, it isn’t a proper rule, because the King just made it up, then and there. ‘It’s the oldest rule in the book,’ the King counters. But, when Alice points out that if the rule was so old, then it ought to have been rule No. 1, the King shuts the notebook he was reading the rules from (and writing them into) and shuffles away in the face of her argument.”

Like Alice, most of us dislike and disobey made-up rules with no basis in reality – at least in our minds.

So educate, then enforce. And most of all, don’t keep making up rules about people more than a mile high or some other exaggeration.

When commissioners worried about boat collisions in zones that might be regulated, the police found that the 18,767 registered vessels in the county had in the past five years had just six reported collisions – hardly, they said, a number that required new laws when current laws would cover those six collisions anyway. 

The principle applies on land too: let well enough alone. If it ain’t broke, it probably doesn’t need new laws to fix it.

Following the rules is much easier if we make fewer rules and they’re logical. Maybe that’s one reason we still play checkers or, on a higher level, chess. The rules are simple to learn, though at least in chess the thought process is anything but. And the game goes on.

It’s true Miamians aren’t very good at following laws about speed on the road. Do you know many people who don’t drive five or 10 miles above the limit, or more?

Our solution to that has not been education so much as adding rules that lower the speed limits in places like school zones and near parks and in residential neighborhoods. We cut limits to 15 or 20 miles per hour in attempts to reduce traffic to really 25 or 30 miles per hour.

We make rules that we know and accept will be violated. That feeds the perception that “the law doesn’t apply to me” because other people are driving even farther above the limit than I am. 

The habit spreads beyond traffic. Other people cheat on their taxes more than I do, so the IRS will go after them, not me. That’s not healthy for a civilized society.

So, how far off the charts are we on following the rules? Does anyone do better?

The World Justice Project Rule of Law Index, which is branded both impartial and non-political, hunts for the answer to that globally and ranks 142 nations.

I would have guessed Singapore, which regulates just about everything, would have been best. After all, they make it a point to ban chewing gum not just in public or in the mouth but within the nation’s borders. They outlaw the public playing of any musical instrument. They have a firm law against feeding pigeons. Nothing is too small to regulate.

But Singapore ranks only No. 17. While the King in the Alice story was looking at mile-high issues, Singapore gets right down into the gutter filled with chewing gum. Maybe it doesn’t make any more sense to people than the King did.

Still, Singapore is better than the United States at following the law. We ranked 26th in 2023, the same as our level in 2022. Most likely we are making too many laws and don’t find that many of them make much sense – at least to us. Or have much real impact.

Best at following the rules: the four Scandinavian nations of Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden. It would be interesting to know how many rules per capita these nations have versus the growing glut that we face in this nation.

Embedded in the 1943 movie “A Stranger in Town,” about a Supreme Court justice on vacation, is a court case in which a hotelier is trapped by decades-old laws regulating the length of hotel sheets and size of pillows. Maybe the hotelier should have known the law, but how would guests know to complain about violations of the rules? 

The police marine patrol was right: What we need is fewer sheety rules, not more of them.