In fact there are grounds on which to be, if not apprehensive, at least a little wary. We have a history in this city, where reform is concerned, of making the same two mistakes over and over. First, we insist on making a ruling to cover absolutely every minuscule eventuality, down to whether the last canape on the tray should actually count as a gift if it has already become terminally sodden. Well, it’s almost that bad; we go in for would-be reform by micromanagement and, again and again, predictably it fails.

The second durable flaw is that we believe, or at least we legislate and editorialize and regulate as if we believed, that a ferocious law and a lot of ferocious implementing regulations will be enough to thwart corruption or even convert to goodness the more intractable hustlers among us. We are continually (and inexcusably) amazed to discover a few years after some seemingly tough law has been enacted that human nature has not been transformed, that big-time lawbreaking, with us since the Garden of Eden, is still going strong on precisely the matter we thought we had just reformed.

The trouble with the teeny-tiny rules meant to pinpoint certain possible offenses is that each one of them, no matter how focused and teeny-tiny, fails to do away completely with the targeted offense. So another teeny-tiny rule is manufactured when Washington indignantly discovers that it has been foiled again, and this rule will in turn eventually generate yet another, and so on. Welfare law, the regulations controlling food stamps and other rules meant to keep the poor and otherwise disadvantaged from mishandling their government benefits are classics here. How to make sure that a relative who is not qualified for assistance doesn’t get some of the food or funds? How to make sure that the poor don’t buy the wrong things in the grocery store (that is, the things the rest of the people are buying)? An example: to keep food-stamp recipients from using the stamps for something other than food, their proper use was circumscribed-which prevents them from being used as currency to buy soap, paper products and similar household necessities found on everybody else’s market list.

This is the sort of thing that engages rule makers and bureaucratic enforcers in endless, unavailing and often truly stupid and socially disadvantageous activity. On welfare-as on all the other subjects now up for reformation-it is essential that the body politic relax a little and look at things this way: There almost certainly will be some cheating, some diversion, some hanky-panky. If the law is good, it will do its broad job and most people will stay within its general rules. Some breathing room must be left for human judgment and dignity and discretion to come into play. Government should go after offenses that matter. Attempts to foreclose every conceivable behavior that could be questioned are self-defeating, enervating and wasteful.

This is true, of course, not just of welfare rules or rules affecting other programs for the poor. It is true as well concerning reform of government ethics, tax laws, campaign financing and whatever else is scheduled for reformation. Among the reasons is the fact that no reform lasts forever, or even for very long. Its targeted population, whether welfare recipients or campaigning politicians or government officials or upper-bracket taxpayers, will fairly quickly learn how to turn the new rules to advantage in a completely legal way, setting the stage for the next wave of reform. The danger is that meanwhile-that is, in the interim between the proud enactment of the new overdetailed reforms and the inevitable revelation that the big problems and corruptions were not affected-some pretty large scandals are likely to occur.

Here we reach the second durable misconception that underlies our reforming impulse: the pathetic notion that once we have inscribed into law a voluminous new code that no one can read and only lawyers can fully navigate, we have done good, have even solved “the problem.” We doze off with an expression of unbearable smugness on our face and awaken only to find what? Oh, the S&L scandal, the HUD scandal, the investment-banking scandal, the pipeline of PAC money to Congress scandal, the BCCI scandal and all the other big ones from the past couple of “highly reformed” decades, not to mention consent decrees on every imaginable kind of industrial malfeasance in the consumer-goods area, plus the fact that more politicians, churchmen, financiers, sports figures, business people and the Lord only knows who all else are either in the slammer or out doing forced community service after having had a pretty good run in the criminal barnyard.

I suppose you could say that the apprehension of so many big shots shows that the reform-mobile worked, but I would argue that the opposite is true. I don’t yearn for the pre-’70s status quo, and I don’t say that things were wonderful in, for example, campaign law, before the current set of statutes was in place. But I think to be honest you really have to face up to the fact that at the end of a couple of decades of effort at reformation in many areas of our public life, we have an awful lot of impenetrable laws, an awful lot of fine-spun regulations and an awful lot of outrageous misbehavior and systemic inefficiency and unfairness. Rational, equitable and understandable laws are likelier to be obeyed by a majority than the other kind, and also likelier to be intelligibly enforced.

Reform is certain, given the unusually hospitable political atmosphere in Washington just now. It is also at least possible that it can be done right-not forever, but for a nice long patch of time. But it is far from a sure bet it will be. Reform laws that are in every sense overwrought-too finely meshed and filigreed in the misguided hope that nothing will get through and too excited in their passion to root out every imaginable wrong-don’t stop corruption. More often they end up providing cover for it.