Damn little of the documentation that runs our lives ever actually gets read. I've refinanced my house a few times. Has any of us ever run down all those documents we sign, and read every word? Oh, we check the important stuff, like the numbers and terms, but so much of legal documentation is like the software agreements we blindly click on to move on with our lives.

Legislation isn't crafted, it's assembled in bulk from hundreds of individual wish lists, each produced by a legislator who has put in their particular item like a prayer stuffed into the Wailing Wall. That item was probably requested by some special interest in their district, and sure as hell money changed hands. I know that sometimes a Congressman will do something for a constituent simply because they're a constituent--I've seen it--but most of the time there are lobbyists and big donors involved. The legislator doesn't have to read the whole thing. Who cares? He just has to make sure his prayer is in there, intact, and that nobody else's prayer conflicts with it.

The stimulus bill appeared like magic, hundreds of pages, because legislators had already been waiting with their particular piece of boilerplate, maybe for years in some cases. Favors for someone in most cases, or maybe something that legislator had been wanting to do for a long time. Actual economic stimulation didn't have jack shit to do with it, except insofar as they could say that spending money on almost anything stimulates one tiny piece of the economy involving their district or interest group.

I did my taxes recently on the computer. Many questions were asked by the program, since it didn't know which credits or penalties applied to me. I could see the actual purpose of the deep reaches of the tax code--reward friends and punish enemies. I'm not on either list for the most part. The code is boilerplate too, assembled over years by hundreds of deals made by hundreds of politicians.