| Notes | Book |
What is a law? A law is an agreement by one group of people to punish members of another group of people who perform certain supposedly well-defined actions. The two groups may theoretically be the same, but that is seldom the case.
Punishing people who have not made a contract that allows them to be punished is obviously a criminal act. Punishing people who have agreed to be punished is a questionable practice. A society that enforces all contracts forever will eventually dissolve into conflict and chaos. That is the reason that all civil contracts have limitations. For example, civil contracts routinely expire after a set period of time.
Therefore a government of laws is as much a criminal conspiracy as any monarchy or dictatorship. A piece of paper cannot pull a trigger.
There has been an argument that government is justified by some kind of inherent social contract theory. In my judgment, that argument is very thin. I do not think that it is reasonable to have a system in which an infant can be born with obligations to which she has not specifically agreed. If there is not agreement, there is no contract. A contract requires agreement.
The phrase “a government of laws not men” conveys the impression that there is some totally objective entity that will enforce all laws evenly at all times. The fact that black men in this country are ten times as likely to be imprisoned as white males should be enough to dispel that notion.
Some may think that black people are more inclined to break the law than others. Well, if laws are really effective in regulating or changing behavior, then black people should be angels by now considering the amount of enforcement they have endured.
The constitution, the highest law of our land, is a successful effort by one group of criminals to justify their criminal actions. For a time these criminals were able to provide enough services to the public to convince most of the public that these criminal actions were justified. The criminals were aided by the fact that there were virtually no people in the world that did not base their society on some kind of criminal theory.
I am saying that the so-called founding fathers of our country were criminals, but most of the people in the world were criminals at that time, and most remain criminals today. The founders attempted to limit the negative consequences of their criminality by such things as checks and balances. Those who would use force or fraud to get what they want obviously have faith in those methods, and they also often justify their criminal actions to themselves and others by vowing to use the loot in socially constructive ways.
Perhaps the idea that it is not necessary to have a society based on criminality is becoming more popular lately. Judging from web sites and their statistics, there are probably millions of American citizens who have reached that conclusion.
Perhaps we can eventually replace “laws” with conflict resolution techniques. Absolute standards of behavior are unenforceable and counterproductive. If the general society must intervene in a conflict, the intervention should be as minimal as possible.