A Nation of Laws

Being a lawyer, I'm as big a believer in us being a nation of laws as anyone. That said, there are many laws which are stupid, ill-fated, mean spirited, power grabbing exercises of government interference and strongarming. So the question becomes: which is which? How do we decided, and where do we draw the line? I think about this quite often, and fortunately, as it turns out, so too does Mrs. DuToit. I'm looking forward with interest to her thoughts in this regard as she takes on specific issues of laws re: the "war on drugs", illegal immigration, and so on. Even so, this introductory piece is good to whet the ol' intellectual appetite, so read the whole thing.

"This has been a really difficult subject to think about. Writing about it will be even more difficult, as there are nuisances that I can only hope to address with the occasional caveat. I’ve made dozens of false starts over the last couple of months, as this is a subject that has been haunting me (and has, frankly, made it incredibly difficult for me to focus on writing anything else). Rather than trying to tackle it all in one post or essay, I’m going to do it in a series… and with that said, I shall attempt to tackle the subject, with this introduction.

We, The People have a nation to manage and maintain, for ourselves and our posterity. We make our laws through our representatives, voted for by us. Our representatives are supposed to do what we want them to do, within the limits of the U.S. Constitution and the various state constitutions—constitutions that we can also change, but with (intentionally) more difficulty.

And this is the point where some of this gets difficult to discuss. I think we would all agree that we have too many laws, or there are some laws that are just silly. Some states, for example, have laws that prohibit dumping trash on the highways, but have exceptions for things like chicken feathers. These strange nuisances and exceptions in the law always seem to make our laws appear to be out of date or not in step with the current population. We accept then, that we have some laws which are hunky-dory to ignore… and that is where the danger is.

We could use a radical reform of our current laws, simplifying or eliminating many, where possible, but that is a post and subject for another day. That isn’t what I want to address here—the millions of millions of laws that many of us do not support, or seem to be in place simply for the purpose of being able to catch someone doing something.

One law that exists in most (if not all) states has restrictions on the use of public spaces. Such laws generally fall under the categories of public nuisance or loitering. You can’t sit on a bus bench for hours and hours, for example (unless you really are waiting for bus). Similarly, you can’t stand on a street corner for no reason other than to stand there. The idea of these laws made (and make) sense when they were written, and has to do with the broader umbrella of the social compact: The streets are not yours… they are ours, and using them too much or without purpose makes you a mooch on what is ours.

So you can’t cruise the streets at night, driving up and down the street for the sole purpose of doing so. You must have a destination and a direction. If not, go home, where you can cruise up and down your living room wearing a path in your own floor, without restriction. Since you are the one who will have to replace the floor when it wears out, We, The people, do not care. We do care when it is the streets that we pay for.

We’ve tended to ignore many of these laws or the police have found themselves in the situation of enforcing them by exception, such as when a bum sleeps under a park bench or a group of kids are hanging out in front of a 7/11, giving all appearances of being up to no good.

But the fact of the matter is that these laws apply to all of us equally, but we tend to mind our own business when those not appearing to be causing trouble, abuse, or violating other laws we have decided we can support.

We also tend to want the police to deal with these matters, rather than taking any actions to enforce our laws ourselves.

Let me try to put that another way to illustrate how strange it is, and how far we have come as a nation from our founding principles:

You have a “don’t run in the house” rule. Obviously, if the house was on fire you would temporarily suspend that law, but you do not allow your children to run in the house. They can run outside, but for reasons of safety and civility, you demand that your children walk in the house.

Do you call a cop if your children run in your house?

Of course not. You do not call a cop for that because you see your house as your bastion—where you are responsible for enforcing civility and rules that keep your family safe.

And that is where we have things screwed up. The public square is our house. We, The People are just as responsible for policing the public square as we are our living rooms. The fact that we also have police, to whom we have delegated some of our responsibilities (for convenience and economies of scale), does not mean we have surrendered the responsibility.

You cannot surrender your responsibilities. They are yours; regardless of to whom you have delegated the task. It is still our job to keep the streets safe, our laws enforced, and our nation decent, regardless of what our delegates do or do not do.

This concept applies to just about everything. You may have delegated the task of educating your children to the public school, but as a parent, you are still responsible for the outcome. If your child is not receiving a proper education, it is your fault, not the school’s. If Johnny can’t read it is because Johnny’s parents haven’t taught him to read—it is not the fault of his teacher. We might need to fire her, or restructure our schools because of it, but that is an attempt to fix a problem, not dismiss our responsibilities. Similarly, I chose to home school our children, but I still pay very close attention to what the public schools are doing, and raise a stink where I think it is needed, because these are still my schools, even if I do not use them.

There are many, many reasons why we have dismissed our obligations in these areas. Some include a misunderstanding of the concepts of “minding our own business” and some fall under the (also misunderstood) umbrella of not wanting to be our brother’s keeper. The latter having to do with an individual’s soul and his relationship with G-d, not what is Caesar’s. What is Caesars is our responsibility, and not only are we our brother’s keeper with respect to enforcement of our nation’s laws, we have a duty and an obligation to do so.

As with all things like this, the changes of attitude did not happen overnight. They came about gradually, many with good intentions, and having to do with the perception that we were being too restrictive as a society.

We’re often treated to the example of the 1950s and how the period had a kind of Draconian social pressure, which caused people to jump out of high buildings. But also with examples like these, they are taken out of context, and without the spirit in which the changes were made. The purpose has been lost.

If people want to ruin their lives, let them, was the context in which we loosened some of the restrictions on society. But there was a flip side to that loosening: that you, and you alone, would have to deal with the consequences.

It wasn’t as if we didn’t know what the consequences would be. We knew that a loosening of sexual taboos, for example, would result in a great deal of misery and things like unwanted pregnancies, higher rates of infant mortality, domestic violence, and child abuse. We knew that, as certain as we knew that the sun would rise in East.

But we decided to allow it to happen, with the understanding that allowing people that kind of liberty would have dire consequences to them. But it was to them that we placed the consequences.

Shortly thereafter, people forgot the agreement—the agreement that we would allow others to ruin their lives, if they also had to deal with it on their own. We weren’t going to bail them out of their messes, or accept any responsibility for things we knew to be foolish and stupid.

There can be no safety net for that sort of thing. If you want the right to screw up, then you must also accept what goes along with that: the responsibility for the outcome. There are no rights where there is not the commensurate responsibility (risk).

Rights come with responsibilities and risk. Failure to recognize the responsibility does not mean that it doesn’t exist (it just demonstrates that the person is stupid).

If a woman has a child out of wedlock (out of society’s purview) then she (and she alone), is responsible for that child. She may have a temporary set back, and there may be private charities who lend her a helping hand, but her decision to bring a child into the world was hers...and all that goes with that decision is hers as well. If that child is starving, it is on her that we place the blame and the accountability. Looking around at an abundant society and asking why we allow that child to starve is wrong-headed. Society did not decide to bring that child into the world. She did. If we want to reverse the thinking, if we want society to be responsible for her children, then society also has the power of the choice itself—which is what society decided to loosen.

You can’t have one without the other. With choice comes the responsibility for the outcome of that choice. If you do not want the responsibility then you must also surrender the choice. With freedom comes responsibility. That is what that phrase means. It doesn’t mean that society has more responsibility. It means that the person who chooses to exercise that greater freedom has greater responsibilities.

I could sum up the above with a trite phrase most of us know: You made your bed. Now lie in it.

Simple as pie, but a concept that seems to be lost by many. (Just as some folks think it is difficult to make a pie—which is the simplest of all things to make!)

If we begin to examine each of these issues, we will find that many (if not most) fall into that loosey-goosey umbrella of morality, which makes all of us a little nervous to discuss or come up with a standard method of application that doesn’t intrude on one’s religious freedom or freedom of conscience.

But lever let it be said that I walked away from a fight, or stayed away from something simply because it was difficult.

Over the next few weeks (or months), I want to begin tackling some of these subjects: prostitution, pornography, marriage, illegal drug use, etc., and look at how these laws and decisions should be handled. Along the way I fully expect to make some people very angry, or challenge their perceptions of the concept of liberty vs. license. I also fully expect to have my assumptions challenged (and corrected, if a good argument is presented), but I’ll warn you: I have been watching these discussions for a long, long time, and unless you bring something truly new and unique to the party, I will not be convinced. I am certain that the usual suspects will dismiss my arguments as “statist” or the usual name calling that occurs when someone attempts to address these subjects. I do not care and will consider (as I always do) that someone casting aspersions or name calling is doing so because they have no argument to contradict my theory.

It will take me a while to do all of this, of course, and there are many other things I may write about during the process (as well as the usual distractions of life and other commitments), but I will do it, regardless of how long it takes.

The first one I will attempt to tackle is the “War on Drugs,” but it will take me a week or more to get it done."