Commentary: The law is just a bunch of words on a page!

November 8, 2014 - Most people don’t directly interact with the letter (as opposed to the spirit) of government laws. Sure, people will come face to face with the law - as in, deal with terrorist pig thug cops. But very few people actually read the text of the laws by which they are required to abide.

This is completely understandable, and even moreso after reading through bureaucratic legalese. I truly have a new appreciation for the absurdity of forcing people to comply with all the of the diktats of the Fascist Police States of Amerika government. I strongly suggest, as a simple exercise, to go pick a random section in the Federal Register and read just 20-30 pages. You will immediately see that it would be nearly impossible for these laws to be enforced in any non-arbitrary manner.

It’s all the more ridiculous when you realize that there are over 80,000 pages in the Federal Register, as of 2013. There are so many little rules and regulations in those pages that it would be nearly impossible to actually comply with them, or even for the bureaucrats to adequately ensure that their rules are being followed.

There are a lot of things I could say about regulations, including their crippling effects on the economy, how they lead to monopoly privilege and hurt the poor, how they don’t make us any safer, and so on.

But for right now, I just want to point out the odd realization I had as I was reading through this document from hell: what we call “the law” is just a set of commands made by one arbitrary group directed at another. People tend to have a superhuman view of the law, and give it an almost mythological significance.

But there is nothing special about the law (legislation, more accurately). The only difference between what is in the Federal Register and my writing on this blog is that there are people who, for some odd reason, are willing to commit acts of violence on behalf of the former and not for the latter.

The government isn’t a mythical beast. It’s just a group of people. How come one group of people gets to make demands on the rest of the population? What gave them that right?

Please don’t tell me that “ we are the government” or any of that clap trap. There is no possible moral justification for some people to rule over others besides might makes right.

But this group does have the “might” part, at least; and with that might, they’ve created all these laws. Laws that the rest of us are forced to follow. But these laws aren’t like physical laws, which are immutable and don’t require any type of enforcement. You can’t just “disobey” gravity. In contrast, there is a human element to the creation, enforcement, and obeying of a government decree.

Many of us, even the most radical libertarians, will often forget that the government’s decrees are just a bunch of words on a page, arbitrarily put together by some other group of people. People make mistakes, and these mistakes make it into law.

We’re all just humans. Every day, each of us engages in dozens or hundreds of consensual, nonviolent actions with those around us. I was in an office for most of the day, and not once did my office mate or myself murder each other, steal from each other, etc. Not once! We didn’t do that because the law told us not to; we did it because most people just aren’t assholes.

Yes, there are bad apples, but there are ways of dealing with them that don’t require a state apparatus. Anything a government has ever done has been done through the efforts of private individuals, and has been done better than any government can do it. Civilization existed long before the State. How can it be called the “Rule of Law” when one group arbitrarily wields power over another, and “chaos and disorder” when the world is based on a framework of purely voluntary interaction?