A Benefit-Cost Analysis of the Bill of Rights ... and beyond

Let's do a benefit-cost analysis (BCA) of the Bill of Rights.

There's a cost to every clause that triggers our litigious proclivities. Courts are clogged. Courthouses are built. Judges are hired. Lawyers absorb fantastic legal fees that could otherwise be spent on the social good. Not to speak of the enormous usurpation of human time.

Maybe the cost of one or another, or even a whole bunch of those clauses cannot be justified by the benefit of the freedoms they protect. Maybe, when you look hard, there's a lot of confusion-generating redundancy that enables lawyers to spend even more precious time and money. Maybe the Due Process Clauses in the 14th and 5th Amendments overlap or are completely redundant. James Madison, though persuaded to draft the Bill, thought that the entire thing was unnecessary in a government of enumerated powers. With a strained national budget and the national debt increasing at a staggering pace, we need to ensure that we're doing this constitutional business right. That is, we need to do it efficiently.

There's no real obstacle. Contingent evaluation studies have shown us that a person's life is worth around $6 million — at least a rich person's life. It's admittedly a bit awkward that those studies determine a poor person's worth at a small fraction of a rich person's. By comparison, monetizing those Bill of Rights freedoms should be a trivial exercise and considerably less awkward.

Does this suggestion seem strange to you? Does it seem strange to consider trying to identify words and phrases and clauses to elide in a framework that has somehow managed to adapt and to sustain the social organization of a diverse country/system for over two hundred years? Is it, perhaps a bit risky to think that we could really understand what social reorganizations our prospective streamlining would bring? Might some of the changes be irreversible because the new social structure no longer permits restoration of the old constitution?

Ok, so perhaps a BCA of the Bill of Rights is not a good idea. Let's do something easier.

Let's just decide how to make the most efficient use of the biophysical underpinnings of life on the planet. When species seem redundant and some are not as useful as others or maybe serve no perceptible use, we should let the less useful ones go extinct. What possible loss could there be from this loss of genetic information? When a piece of land is not being used to its fullest productive capacity, and when there's still some measurably excess capacity to absorb insults (aka waste), let's insult it and increase our production. What reason do we have not to run the biophysical world at its productive maximum?

This is, after all, sound modern resource management. This is a good idea. Isn't it?