The cost of haste is always paid by someone else

The New York Post reports that California lawmakers are racing to send hundreds of bills to Governor Gavin Newsom before the legislative session closes — measures that could, by the paper's account, affect residents' wallets, cars, and families. I have never sat in that chamber, and I cannot pretend to recall a single vote cast there. But I have spent enough time watching legislators work by candlelight against a deadline to know that haste and good law are rarely friends.

Here is the arithmetic a working person should apply: when a bill is passed quickly, the stated cost is almost always the floor, not the ceiling. The drafters have not had time to imagine every consequence; the regulators who must enforce it have not had time to map every compliance burden; and the citizen who must live under it has certainly not had time to organize and object. Speed in legislation is a subsidy paid by the public to the people who wrote the bill.

On the matter of laws touching vehicles and household budgets, I would ask the specific question I always asked of colonial currency schemes and bank proposals: who bears the cost if the policy fails, and who collects the gain if it succeeds? If the answer is that a diffuse public bears the cost while a concentrated interest collects the gain, the bill deserves a second look regardless of its stated purpose. This is inference on my part, not a claim the Post's lead makes directly — but it is the inference a long life in commerce teaches.

I am no enemy of regulation as such. A well-run post office, a sound system of weights and measures, a honest disclosure requirement on a bill of credit — these are regulation serving the public. The question is never whether a government may act; it is whether this act, at this moment, with this drafting, under this deadline, actually serves the people it names as beneficiaries.

My counsel to any California resident reading the morning paper is plain and old: do not wait for a journalist to summarize what a new law costs you. Find the bill number. Read the fiscal note. Ask what the compliance requirement is in the first year, not the fifth. The citizen who cannot be bothered to read the law is as surely governed by it as the one who reads every word — with the disadvantage of being surprised.

A legislature that must pass hundreds of bills on a single day has, by that fact alone, confessed that it did not do the work in the months before. The remedy is not despair; it is the patient, organized attention of constituents who make clear, early in the next session, that they intend to be heard before the final hour. Industry applied to civic life pays the same compound return as industry applied to a trade.