I like Newt Gingrich. I like him a lot. Why? Well because he's proposed some pretty radical and unconventional ways to solving lots of our problems (such as health care) in a very "masses-friendly" way. "What do you mean?" you might be thinking right now. Well, Newt said something once that I really liked: "Why should lawyers be the only ones who can practice law? Why should doctors be the only ones who can practice medicine? There is not much different form these privileged classes than those during the age of feudalism." While he might not have worded it that way, that's pretty much what he was trying to say.
Those few lines gave birth to a whole new set of ideas. It sounds pretty messed up when you think about how the law is so complicated and limited to a certain privileged upper-class (lawyers) that the common man must depend on him for just about everything. But how possibly could we make it so that anybody who wants to could practice law (as in, defend or present themselves in a court of law)? Sure, it's not going to happen (lawyers rule our universities, politics, economy, and everything in-between) but wouldn't it be nice to break the cycle and allow the average Joe to take an employer, for example, to court without having to fork out thousands of bucks for a suit-and-tie lawyer? How could we do that? Simple: make laws so simple that anybody could defend themselves in a court of law.
Let me explain a neat concept. We all occupy a number of social positions: we are children, fathers, mothers, workers, consumers, etc. What if laws were completely restructured as to where the only ones that existed came in the form of a bill of rights for each of these social positions? For example: no longer would you have catalog-thick law books on labor regulations and child support codes, but workers and mothers would each have a very simple, straight-forward 10-point (or 15, 20, etc.) bill of rights. I'm sure all of the tens of thousands of lines of labor laws could be generalized and stuffed into 10 categories, no? "The right to a 40 hour work week [until overtime kicks-in] with at-least 1 day off." "The right to 2 week vacations for every one year worked." You get the drift.
Everyday I open the newspaper and see more and more regulations and laws being passed. I wonder who the hell keeps track of them all. Before they had "lawyers" and now they have "driving case lawyers." Next thing you know, they'll have lawyers for employees hurt on the right foot, and lawyers for employees hurt on the left foot. Why not just simplify the law so that the common man, with the help of a simple list of his rights from his local government building, can take on a monolithic corporation?
It's a very rightist action (small government) with a very leftist goal (people power.)
