"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now, that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
One thousand upvotes. The criminalization of everyday life (of which licensing/regulation/registration/TSA searches are a key part) goes hand in hand with fewer actions against actual criminals like those involved in the recent spate of "flash mob" attacks.
We've seen this before. In the Soviet Gulag depicted in "The Way Back", one of the leads questions why the guards have given so much authority to the Russian mafia within the prison. The answer is that such criminals are just a misunderstood product of bourgeois society, hence friends of the people. But political prisoners, like those who tried to start businesses, had no such excuse; they were the enemies of the people.
Same thing in today's USA. The mob of teens who broke Emily Guendelsberger's leg could not be arrested because the policemen were afraid of charges of racism.
All I remember people asking was if they knew anything
about the giant group on Broad Street, and then saying
no, and the police saying all they could do was something
along the lines of chances are good they’ll attack
somebody else, and we’ll get them then, we can’t do
anything right now. I remember one of them specifically
saying "We can’t just go start arresting or picking up
black juvenile males." Then he said, "We can’t do
anything right now because you can’t identify anybody." I
also remember people saying we understood that they
should break up the group at least or do something since
it was such a large group. And they said basically that
if they scattered it would be worse so they weren’t
going to do that.
But those self-same policemen know they will get much less resistance, and more money for the state, if they ticket and fine middle-class citizens.
We're trained in school to recognize every little similarity to the Nazis, but are completely ignorant about patterns that are reminiscent of the Soviets.
> Same thing in today's USA. The mob of teens who broke Emily Guendelsberger's leg could not be arrested because the policemen were afraid of charges of racism.
I don't get it: Arresting/picking up black teenagers in a large city simply because of their skin color would be racist, would it not? Isn't that exactly what the policeman is saying?
Your belief that targeting black teenagers in general would of course lead to the arrest of the specific (unidentified) perpetrators doesn't sound all that likely to me.
Read the full article. The policemen said they would not arrest the kids in the mob who had attacked them, despite multiple eyewitnesses pointing out this mob, ostensibly because of the lack of individual identifiability, but in reality because the policemen were afraid of being demagogued as "racists".
I don't find that to be the most plausible mechanism for the proliferation of laws at all. More likely, it's an emergent property of the legal system in a democratic context that can probably be explained in terms of game theory. At any legislative junction, there's a cost or benefit associated with enacting or not enacting a law. Take the arrowhead removal example from the article. You're a lawmaker and you're faced with the problem of people pilfering Native American artifacts, and this law is presented to you. Which side are you going to be on? The side of desecration? Or the side of preservation? Boom. Another law. At each juncture, there's a good reason to pass another law.
What emerges from this is a jumble of laws. Each local decision is made in response to an immediate concern, and cannot take the jumble-of-laws problem into account. You're only adding one law, after all, and it's benefit is clear.
"Well, what about repealing some?," you may ask. Well, what's the "game" when it comes to repealing them? Even if each law got on the books for--heh--objectively bad reasons, those reasons were still "good" in that they contained a political benefit. Often, repealing them would have the unacceptable adverse consequence of giving up that benifit. You wanna be the guy to repeal the broken sex offender registry laws and be perceived as on the side of rapists and pedophiles? How bout the U.S.A P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act and be perceived as being "on the side of the terrorists"? What now, hotshot?!
None of the above requires a conspiracy, as your post intimates. Those effects emerge as unintended consequences from the dynamics of a system. The even more infuriating thing about that quote in this context is that it ignores the corrective power of a democracy in crisis. There eventually does come a point where people wise up and rise up on specific issues. Prohibition, slavery, and civil rights come to mind. Revolutions, as they say, are impossible until they happen, and then they were inevitable.
Finally, the mechanism of control in your Rand quote is just ludicrous. How would one "cash in on guilt" in a system that is as patently absurd as the one you cite? Nobody would feel guilt about breaking those laws. The arrowhead collectors didn't "feel guilt." Quite the opposite, it seems. They paid the bill and openly talk about how absurd it is. The only way one could use a system like the one you outline would be to actually lock everyone up. It's just not practical, and it's not even the kind of control your example seems to advocate. Ostensibly, the controllers in your fictional example want people to behave a certain way out of fear of being locked up, not to actually have to lock them up for misbehaving.
Try to critically scratch the surface of word-butchered fanboy fictional allegories that comprise Ayn Rand's work before posting them here verbatim as if they actually have any bearing on the real world. The real issue here, and one from which your post serves as a distraction, is the evisceration of the mens rea requirement for a finding of guilt.
In a free society, everything is permissible unless it is forbidden. In a non-free society, everything is forbidden unless it is permitted. When the laws are so numerous and complicated that the ordinary person does not know what is forbidden, a free society feels and functions like an un-free society.
A society under law means that people cannot be prosecuted by the whim of the authority, but only according to objective, written law. Yet even a society of written law can be under arbitrary rule if the laws are so numerous and complicated, that citizens do not know when they are breaking them, and if violations are so common that prosecutions and penalties are exacted based on police and prosecutorial "discretion."
Perhaps the legislature that pass the laws and the executive branch that lobbies for them have no idea of their cumulative effect, but I doubt it. They are not rubes. They are experts in the domain in the same way that experienced programmers are expert in theirs. They have to know that they are steadily transforming society from a free one, to one that is not free, from one that is ruled by law, to one that is ruled by men. Yet they don't care. The simplest explanation is that people who are attracted to government are people who want to control other people. If they weren't, if they valued freedom, they would refuse to create laws for the same reason that 37 Signals refuse to add features to their software: because while each individual law or feature may have merit, the cumulative effect is to destroy the more important value of freedom (or, in the case of software, simplicity.)
China. Or anywhere else that's closer to the Napoleonic code (command and control laws) than the common law (custom-based laws). (Sorry, I'm not a lawyer, so my terminology might not be accurate).
The problem is, the law is accountable to the government, not the other way round.
I guess you could create a hybrid system, in which higher courts shape the morass of law and precedent into simple explicit codes for the citizenry and lower courts to follow. That might give you the best of both worlds, but it might have its own problems.
It always has been and it's still the case in America that what is not prohibited is permitted. The problem is that in the last 70 years, the number of prohibitions have greatly increased. Technically we're still free; practically, there are fewer free domains available. The internet is one such domain, and that's why there is so much innovation here as compared to, say, banking or medicine.
I think it's a perfectly apposite quote. No, the proliferation of laws is not there as the result of an evil conspiracy to make everyone guilty of something. But sometimes you can clearly illustrate harmful side effects in fiction by postulating evil conspiracies that do things for the sake of the harmful side effects.
Nobody knows the law anymore. Everyone is guilty of something. If the police want to arrest you, they can find some charge or another. Who has power in a world like that? Why, the person who decides whether or not to prosecute you for a law that thousands or millions of other people are breaking.
>>But sometimes you can clearly illustrate harmful side effects in fiction by postulating evil conspiracies that do things for the sake of the harmful side effects.
I'd say that by postulating an evil conspiracy that does things for the sake of harmful side effects, you are obscuring the mechanism that produces the harmful side effects in the real world. People have a tendency anyway to see agents that execute plans instead of faceless systems that happen to produce certain effects.
Of course, evil conspiracies might still make for good fiction, but stories like that usually don't do as well at offering insights as they could, because a large portion of readers will be misled into thinking there really is a conspiracy.
Nobody knows the law anymore. Everyone is guilty of something.
This argument is reductio ad absurdum. The corpus of law bearing significant consequences for violators [1][2] is sufficiently small as to be almost intuitively understood by any reasonably educated person.
As a general rule, you're not going to be confronted by the full weight and force of the state for violating the jaywalking statute. Were you to be targeted for arrest for such a minor violation, it would be transparent to knowledgeable observers that you were specifically targeted and surveilled until a reason was found to arrest you.
[1] By significant, I mean incarceration and/or crippling financial penalties. And note that the cost of defending oneself is categorically not a penalty.
[2] This, of course, only applies to societies ruled by law, as opposed to those ruled by individual persons or groups
I'm too tired to find the reference, but some woman recently got sentenced to serve 90 days (thereabouts) incarceration for planting a garden in her front lawn in contradiction to local ordinances. Of course this is a prime example of civil disobedience, as she intentionally flaunted this absurd law, challenged it as best she could in court, then paid the price of losing.
The point is, you can be tossed into the clink for just about anything if you are brazen enough to openly challenge the law and don't prevail. Judges don't care much for the proles challenging the state.
What if all laws (except for the Constitution) automatically sunsets after a period of time, say, 20 years?
The job of the legislation is to create laws, by definition. So is it any wonder we end up with an accumulation of laws, some outdated? With an automatic sunset of all laws, this keeps the legislation busy without burdening us with an accumulation of outdated laws.
If it's really important, let the law be renewed after twenty years.
What would be good would be to have new laws sunset over a shorter period of time, say 5 years, and then they would renew for a longer period of time each time they were renewed.
Reducing laws means reducing the bureaucracy supporting their enforcement. This is a powerful counter-incentive. This would never be discussed in public, but will induce lots of rationalizations.
Example: When Prohibition of alcohol ended, the regulating agency faced serious reductions in staff. Funny, severe restrictions on firearms (NFA) were enacted right about the same time - and guess which body was assigned oversight and enforcement?
Bureaucratic inertia. Who in their right mind would advocate their own good job be cut? Another example: the DEA broadcasts insane propaganda to justify itself while turning a deaf ear to real solutions for the withering violence on the Mexican border. It's infected.
You _are_ aware that the BATF and other agencies have been facilitating that violence, right? Google "Operation Fast And Furious", then consider how that contributes to ever-growing bureaucracy.
I don't disagree with what you wrote, but I too got tripped up on "cash in on guilt". I read it twice before deciding it doesn't mean cashing in on a person's inner turmoil, but rather exploiting the fact that the person is legally guilty.
The quote is much more sensible under that interpretation.
In context, I think it means the former. Not having the context available, your interpretation of the remarks at hand might make more sense.
However, a motif of Rand's is to moralize about capitalism and individuality. One of the themes, of which I think the current quote is an example, is that people have been trained to feel bad about their selfish impulses. Rand viewed the laws of her time as an outgrowth of the "evil" of altruism. As such, their "power" comes not just from being enforced, but from being held out as altruistic norms and carrying the moral weight that goes beyond their mere enforcement. As ludicrous as that sounds, I think I disagree with you and find it even more ludicrous that the antagonist actually wants to incarcerate people. To what end?
Also, the antagonist explicitly disavows that he want the laws obeyed, and also that they are even meaningful. He's trying to get people to live in fear.
> I think I disagree with you and find it even more ludicrous that the antagonist actually wants to incarcerate people. To what end?
The point is not to incarcerate people, but rather to gain leverage by being able to credibly threaten incarceration. This is standard operating procedure for prosecutors and police when dealing with confidential informants in drug cases. It's not such a stretch to think it may also happen in other cases.
I think you're missing a crucial "way things work" here...
Yes, a lot of these things happen through more-or-less the path of least resistance... Sure. But that doesn't mean there's a certain consciousness, a certain awareness among those who allow, who occasionally guide things this way.
I'm way, way on the other of the spectrum from Rand and have no use for her politics in general.
But this particular quote is a fine description for bureaucrats of all pin-stripes, all cardigans and all suits. No one would ever say this but they feel the awareness that proliferating laws give them power against nearly everyone when nearly everyone breaks the laws. And that power, of course, can used against whoever criticizes, annoys or stands against them.
'Current law provides a range of options to protect society, he says. "It would be horrible if they started repealing laws and taking those options away."'
That's the most disturbing line in the piece to me. Laws used to frustrate, oppress, or even enslave a citizenry are always written under the guise of offering 'options for protection'. Why do we need to wiretap private citizens? To keep private citizens safe of course.
Then, there's laws written to keep large companies like Exxon or WalMart from polluting the environment or mistreating their workers, but prosecutors can't get convictions against their herculean legal teams, so they end up convicting small businesses and private citizens because they're easier targets.
The problem with these laws is not that they criminalize non-criminals, its that the actual criminals aren't impeded by them at all.
> 'Current law provides a range of options to protect society, he says. "It would be horrible if they started repealing laws and taking those options away."'
This quote also disturbed me, but for a slightly different reason: The prosecutor who is speaking is implying that the large number of laws give him a lot of options, i.e., he is (almost) free to persecute on whim. If there were fewer laws, he would be more constrained, have fewer options.
The whole point of written law is to prevent government from prosecuting on whim. A written law forces government to use objective standards. Yet when there are so many laws that everyone is guilty, the effect is the same as when there are no laws: prosecutions are conducted on whim (aka police and prosecutorial "discretion".)
> With just 5 percent of the world’s population, the US currently holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners. In 2008, over 2.3 million Americans were in prison or jail, with one of every 48 working-age men behind bars
> Prior to the 1970s, private corporations were prohibited from using prison labor as a result of the chain gang and convict leasing scandals. But in 1979, Congress began a process of deregulation to restore private sector involvement in prison industries to its former status, provided certain conditions of the labor market were met. Over the last 30 years, at least 37 states have enacted laws permitting the use of convict labor by private enterprise, with an average pay of $0.93 to $4.73 per day.
> Subsequently, the nation's prison industry – prison labor programs producing goods or services sold to other government agencies or to the private sector -- now employs more people than any Fortune 500 company (besides General Motors), and generates about $2.4 billion in revenue annually.
People complain about activist judges but I think a bigger problem is activist prosecuters who look to stretch the law to include targets that were not intended by the law. The biggest example of this that I can think of is the anti-hacking laws that are being made to charge people of simply using a web browser.
You can see that in the comment from a prosecutor quoted in the piece that refers to "options". If you really wanted to ban some kind of behavior, the ideal outcome would be that everyone who does it is arrested, and nobody who doesn't. But from law-enforcement's perspective what they often want are "options" for prosecution--- so that when they find someone who they're pretty sure deserves to be arrested, they can dig up a statute that justifies the arrest. In that setting you actually want them as broad as possible, so you always have something in your back pocket to get someone with. Of course you don't prosecute everyone who uses a web browser... but if you find someone doing something "bad" but in a way that isn't specifically criminalized, it's always nice to have that "did a bad thing while using a webbrowser" charging option, eh?
I can sort of see the motivation; nobody likes to see someone who you're 95% sure is guilty manage to beat any charges because you technically couldn't get anything solid. But it's more dangerous a cure than the disease, I think.
I found the article weird in that respect. None of these laws seem particularly odious -- the ones that seem unjust could have been avoided by prosecuters using their discretion.
Also, I'm amused by an article about injustices in the criminal system where everyone pictured is a well-off white man.
> Also, I'm amused by an article about injustices in the criminal system where everyone pictured is a well-off white man.
That is by design, since the stereotype for "middle class" is the well-off white man, and this article is attempting to motivate the middle class. Revolutions only happen when a critical mass of the middle class switches sides.
I'd argue it's flagrant abuse of the death penalty, to the extent that several states (Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York) have banned it since 2000 on constitutional / equitable use grounds. The politicization of prosecution makes certain punishments untenable.
Not that there isn't a certain amount of abuse of "anti-hacking" and similar rules.
In both cases (capital crimes, small-scale / activist hacking), defendants are often have limited means (and these are often further restricted through prosecutor maneuvers), and a plausible case can be made before a lay jury.
You mention people of limited means. Without a doubt in my mind, the government often uses the inability of people to afford a good lawyer to convict them. And from what I have seen, public defenders leave a lot to be desired.
I've heard people say that rich people get special treatment by the justice system but I suspect that they simply have to money necessary to make the system behave as it should.
I think an even bigger problem recently is nonactivist bank regulators: the country would probably be much better off if Geithner had allowed Sheila Bair at the FDIC to wind up Citi, Wells, BoA, etc.
great vids. the often overlooked flip-side is that cops Don't Like uncooperative people, so you could save yourself a pricey court appearance by cooperating when innocent.
True story: traffic cop pulls me over, turns out im doing something wrong and he could have me towed. cop asks to search my car for drugs and weapons. "Do I have the right to refuse this search?" Cop responds that I do, but heavily implies that he will have me towed if I refuse. I consented, he found no drugs or guns, I was allowed to drive away.
True story: I was driving home after a long day out with friends (hiking with some, dinner with another). Started feeling very sleepy, pulled off the freeway to take a nap. Woke with a flashlight in my face and highway patrol knocking on my window.
Exited the car, locking it. Identified myself and presented ID. Refused consent to search the vehicle: "I don't consent to any search". Officer implied strongly that he could get a warrant (it's around midnight). "You do what you've got to do, I don't consent to a search".
Got breathalyzed (I could have refused this but that would have required a trip for a blood draw), which was clean (hadn't consumed any alcohol for hours). Eventually allowed to go on my way.
Later realized I had a couple of prescription painkiller pills given by a friend (for severe pain I was experiencing at the time) which probably wouldn't have been a good thing to turn up in a search. The This American Life drug court segment relates a story that could have been very similar to mine.
Given the premise of the original article, electing not to assert your rights isn't particularly safe.
Note that when I did assert my rights, I really didn't have any reason for doing so other than that they are my rights. It was literally a couple of years later that I made the association between the stop and the possibility that I may have been carrying what were technically illegal drugs.
Meh, every single person in the US is already a felon. We all possess schedule I drugs in our bodies[1], and there is plenty of legal precedent saying that you can be convicted of narcotics possession for drugs that are in your body.
That's a great critique of the CSA, but it's not really legally relevant. No court would convict for possession of endogenous DMT, and then that would be the precedent.
Or to put it more simply, you're innocent until proven guilty. Felon means conviction.
You're quibbling. I mean, I understand that legally, one has to obtain a conviction to refer to someone as a felon, but practically, that's not the case, not with activist DAs floating around, trying to make a name for themselves as "tough on crime".
Yeah, that's a fair point. But what I was getting at is that no one has ever been convicted for endogenous possession, and no one ever will, so in this case my point stands.
Are there established limits? For example, I believe there is always alcohol in your bloodstream (or at least there is if you use products on your skin containing alcohol) but that is not a crime unless you exceed the BAC threshold.
Roscoe Howard, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, argues that the system "isn't broken."
The US, the "Land of the Free", has a per capita prison population that it 5-10 times greater than any of it's first-world colleagues. The system is broken.
There could be other interpretations to that, besides "we are less free!"
Could one not argue that an increase in prison inmates is the unavoidable consequence of increasing freedoms? It seems counter intuitive, but perhaps the more freedoms one has, the more readily one encroaches on freedoms one does not have?
People aren't all that different, and generally want the same things. Besides, the US isn't that much freer than its first-world contemporaries. For example, although we in Australia don't have constitutionally-protected freedom of speech, the Press Freedom Index puts us as having more freedom of public speech than in the US, and both of us are well below most of the northern European states.
The word "freedom" occurs much more frequently in American political discourse, but that does not mean that Americans are automatically freer than anywhere else. I find it hard to believe that those extra freedoms that Americans do have (which most don't seem to exercise in day-to-day life) is sufficient to cause a fivefold increase in per capita prison population.
Another possible explanation that occurs to me today: the punishments in America are greater. The guy who bombed Oslo and killed 80-some kids in Norway is allegedly facing a max of something like 25 years. He'd get multiple life sentences in America.
According to BBC radio this morning it is 21 years although I believe this can be extended for 5 years at a time if they believe he still faces a danger to society.
This is why deregulation is important. I think a perfect government has a slightly liberal congress, with an extremely conservative judicial branch. I'd rather be judged using the original meaning of the constitution rather than some activist judge's interpretation of "the spirit of the constitution that applies today".
What really disappoints me is that we apparently have people who have been trusted with enormous power by the citizenry (the prosecutors) who seem wholly incapable of taking a step back and asking themselves, "is this discretionary action I'm about to take to prosecute these people going to make the world better or worse?" and then acting reasonably.
It is cute to point out the guys getting busted for searching for arrowheads, but upwards of 85% of the people in prison in the US are black or hispanic. I'd guess that an even larger percentage are poor. This process is not without a target.
A criminal defense lawyer once told me that he was convinced that certain police officers had a personal mission to make sure that every black boy in certain neighborhoods has a criminal record by the time he is an adult.
"And now bills were passed, not only for national objects but for individual cases, and laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt." —Tacitus, Annals Book III, 27
Of course there should be a law against taking artifacts from archaeologic sites and laws against disturbing the sites by digging. These sites should be posted though, much the same private land is posted "no hunting". Instead of throwing the law out, require that the onus be on the site owner to inform people that the site is, in fact, protected.
Copyright and drug laws are the two largest offenders in this respect. Check out the recent moves the the US Congress to make linking to the 'wrong' site a felony (the '10 Strikes' legislation).
Once they've criminalized being a common person, then the government can exercise discretion and selection to eliminate people they does not like, for any reason.
I have no problem whatsoever with a law that criminalizes stealing arrowheads, or other artifacts, from archaeological sites. I have no problem with laws that prohibit poisoning water, dumping chemicals, killing endangered species, or other environmental crimes. So, if this is proliferation, please sign me up for more. I know that these things were not crimes fifty years ago, but we are better off now for having these laws. Sure, there are some stupid ones, like the Smokey Bear thing, but come on--has anyone been charged with that law?
I hope you read more of the article than the first paragraph and realized they were not at an archeological site and did not steal any arrowheads, they were merely looking for them as a father and son hobby. No arrowheads were found, but the act of merely looking is criminal, which they were not aware of.
I value your contribution to this discussion, but you might have missed this part of the article: "Wendy Olson, the U.S. Attorney for Idaho, said the men were on an archeological site that was 13,000 years old. "Folks do need to pay attention to where they are," she said."
Thanks for pointing that out, it's a reasonable concern. That is indeed the US Attorney's argument.
Just to clarify, it is not necessary to be on a recognized archeological site to be illegal, intending to collect artifacts on federal land is a crime whether a recognized archeological site or not.
But in this case they were in camping in "Salmon River Canyon, near the mouth of Graves Creek, which is in Idaho County" on land "administered by the Bureau of Land Management".
It's not a recognized archaeological site beyond the interpretation that every location in the US is an archaeological site.
To be sure, there are arrowheads and/or evidence of human habitation on nearly every square mile of this continent. Just having the possibility of arrowheads doesn't make something a real archaeological site unless we bend the definition so far as to not have any meaning.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers." -- Ayn Rand
I'm probably going overboard by responding to both the Rand fanboy quotes, but here goes.
There's no way to rule innocent men.
Yes, there is, to the extent that that rule is legitimate. Usually, just powers arise from the consent of the governed. For example, sane people pay taxes because they understand that they have need of the canonical services of roads, fire service, police, the military, and the like.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
This typical Rand drivel sounds good on the surface, but either doesn't actually mean anything or is outright wrong. If it just means that "enforcement only comes in to play when an infraction is suspected," then it's a tautology. If it means that the government doesn't also do things like establish air traffic control, a consistent system of laws for the roads, and establish bright lines like ages of consent and whatnot, then it's clearly just wrong. On a factual level. A lie or an omission. Unworthy of a "philosopher."
One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
In very few systems, and especially in the instant case of the American legal system, does "[o]ne" declare anything to be a crime. I often wonder where Randians actually live, or what their connection to political reality is. Have they not taken even a grade-school level class in civics? Oh, I'm just a bill on Capitol Hill, anyone?
But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers.
And the whole thing collapses on itself, ironically, in a fit of internal logical inconsistency coming from the Prophetess of Logic herself, Ayn Rand. Laws "pass" in a democratic system. Again, "[o]ne" cannot even do it. One can only decree. "Passing" is a democratic concept pertaining to the outcome of a vote. It seems like a nitpick, I know, but remember who was cited. This is Ayn "A is A" Rand, who thinks that all of human nature can be derived from the laws of logic, one of which she exclusively calls out, the Law of Non-Contradiction.
Finally, this it's "impossible for men to live without breaking laws" thing is really really weird when compared against reality. There are tons of laws on the books that just go unenforced because law enforcement and the judicial system possess the very reasoning powers that Rand so often wants to remove from them. Remember when Taggart shot the guard near the end of Atlas Shrugged? Rand justified that for the reader by dehumanizing the guard as an unthinking automaton. Well, why aren't these unthinking automatons enforcing laws about the size of switch with which you can beat your wife? Why aren't they enforcing the laws in Washington state that make it literally impossible to get a motorcycle endorsement? (You have to take the class to get the endorsement, but you need the endorsement to take the class.) Because they're not unthinking automatons. And the very fact that they aren't allows the other glaring contradiction to this impossible-to-live-legally trope: precisely those impossible-to-follow laws exist, and they don't get enforced for pragmatic reasons. Perhaps this is the real reason for Rand's oft-stated hatred for pragmatism; It's actual effects wholly invalidate her stupid little "philosophy".
> Yes, there is, to the extent that that rule is legitimate. Usually, just powers arise from the consent of the governed. For example, sane people pay taxes because they understand that they have need of the canonical services of roads, fire service, police, the military, and the like.
It is Randians who think that civilization is the only free lunch.
The Andersons are two of the hundreds of thousands of Americans to be charged and convicted in recent decades under federal criminal laws—as opposed to state or local laws—as the federal justice system has dramatically expanded its authority and reach.
"Who could have predicted that breaking into people's voicemail was going to cause such a fuss?"
Is this Hacker News? I suppose it might be tied to our theme by the story of the inventor.
I think it's a shame that the US federal government has ballooned the way it has, and I believe it's a slap in the face of the Constitution. Discarding the concept of mens rea while maintaining more than 250,000 pages of regulation is malicious, and anyone supporting this movement is not someone who should be in political power.
What I don't understand (as a non-US-citizen, mind you) is how the fact that these are federal laws is relevant at all. It sounds to me like the problem is the number of obscure laws, the vagueness of the offenses, and the lack of mens rea requirement.
Surely it would be just as bad if these were state laws (for the citizens of that state, anyway)? Or are there for some reason no state laws of that kind? If so, what could be the reason?
As a US citizen, I find the diminishing mens rea requirements very disturbing. One should never be guilty of a crime despite making a reasonable effort to avoid the illegal behavior.
To give an example, in Florida, one is guilty of a felony for having sex with a person under 18 (if the older person is 24 or older) no matter how reasonable it might have been to believe the person was of legal age. A forged driver's licence that would fool the DMV and get the bartender off is no defense here; it's a strict liability crime.
I would favor a Constitutional amendment blocking the enforcement of any criminal law that did not include a culpable mental state for every element of the crime. To implement such a change without crippling the legal system, it could make the default mental state criminal negligence if none is given.
IANAL but it's bad for citizens because it gives federal courts wider purview on what they'll prosecute for and how they punish for it; needless to say, if your case is getting pushed to federal courts you're fucked, especially when you're being charged under statutes you've never heard of rather than state laws which you may or may not know.
Not "needless to say" at all. Why are you more fucked in a federal court than in a state court? Why would you be more likely to have never heard of a given federal statue than a given state law?
IANAA (I am not an American) but it's an important aspect of the American legal system (as well as a political issue about state vs. federal government in the US).
>It sounds to me like the problem is the number of obscure laws, the vagueness of the offenses, and the lack of mens rea requirement.
You're right. There is another issue, though, relating to the massive power of the central government.
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Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
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The US was designed to be a Federal system, with all non-delegated powers belonging to the states, not the central government.
Besides the fact that our nation is meant to have a small Federal government, it is easier to manipulate and fight unjust laws at lower levels of government than the behemoth that is Washington, DC.
- Ayn Rand