by Jack Campitelli | July 31st, 2011
Précis: unethical laws, budget, arbitrary and capricious enforcement, reduction of number of laws, reduction in size of government, cut in wages for government employees, the ATF, Veterans cemetery in Texas, law schools, Department of Justice, government arrogance, market forces that will take care of the economy.
The good thing about economics (and budgets) is that the market will correct itself in time. It’s doing it now. What legislators do may make a difference one way or the other but the correction is afoot. Corrections that are not planned properly and executed perfectly usually are hurtful to watch and certainly terrible to live through. But the ship will right itself though it’s hard to say who will still be onboard.
In all the budget discussions we’ve heard ad nauseum, I have not heard one proposal to cut government itself. Lay off 20% of the workforce tomorrow. Or keep the work force and cut wages by 20%. But I’m going to leave that aside, too. The market will act. Many a big, fat, mighty, all powerful government has been taken down by the same forces that are at work in our own: stupidity.
But the discussions we’re not having are about our laws. Our tens of thousands of laws. Laws no one, and I mean no one, can understand or put together coherently. If someone does not leave high school with an understanding of the law of the land, then they can’t be expected to keep laws they’ve never heard of or don’t understand.
If to the uncountable laws you add attendant regulations and heaped upon that you add legal decisions about those laws and regulations that are too massive to even house, then you have a legal system that lends itself to being “capricious and arbitrary.” That means that whoever has a grudge against you can use the laws anyway they want to send you to prison or take your property. Law schools usually teach a course about how laws get their right to exist and what is a moral and immoral law. One of the measures that must be met is that a law must be promulgated – that means it must be noticed to everyone so that everyone understands it. Since no one can do that, most laws are inherently immoral.
This is not a legal defense. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a valid point.
The U.S. retains, as it has for years, the distinction of having a greater percentage of its population in prison than any country on earth. Including China. Syria. Russia. We’ve created private prisons that demand new inmates! Prison guards have unions that need prisoners. Besides our foreign wars or non-wars, we have created wars on drugs, terrorism, pornography – that have bloated our federal payroll and justice department that like their cushy paychecks and don’t want to stop. After all, they’re helping America.
Our current “scandal” involves an ATF operation that was conceived in hell and run by idiots. (These are the same idiots who burned down the compound in Waco, Texas that killed women and children.) There’s the woman who runs a Veteran cemetery in Texas that won’t let the word God be used when burying our fallen. Who ARE these people? Can’t you smell the arrogance of government?
Here’s the next law I’d like to see passed by Congress and signed by the president: for every new law that is passed, ten laws must be repealed. That will be a sobering moment for the boys and girls in Washington. But it needs to happen.
Do you know that more than one half of all our laws have no counterpart in other first world countries? That’s right. Guys are doing time for offenses that no one else on earth even considers a crime.
This is what America has become and there is not one word in the budget talks about the cost of laws. The cost of enforcement. The cost of prosecution. The cost of prisons. The cost of taking non-violent people out of the productive system and locking them up and paying for it. Here’s a small reason why? Do you know that there is actually a department in the Department of Justice that decides whether to prosecute or not based on how much the government can seize or the fines they can extract?
The beast that is government is facing going on a diet. It will not be happy. You are food. If you don’t feed it, they will just go get the food.
The faster we can cut the beast down to a manageable size, the safer we will all be.
