"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.
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.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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".
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?
[+] [-] ctdonath|14 years ago|reply
- Ayn Rand
[+] [-] temphn|14 years ago|reply
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.
http://mobile.avclub.com/philadelphia/articles/flash-mob-fal...
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.
[+] [-] mkn|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] padobson|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dpatru|14 years ago|reply
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".)
[+] [-] v21|14 years ago|reply
> 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.
http://www.alternet.org/world/151732/21st-century_slaves%3A_...
[+] [-] RexRollman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _delirium|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] starwed|14 years ago|reply
Also, I'm amused by an article about injustices in the criminal system where everyone pictured is a well-off white man.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|14 years ago|reply
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.
For more, see the Innocence Project: http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/The_Death_Penalty.ph...
Not that I disagree with your basic premise of prosecutorial misconduct.
[+] [-] MaysonL|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dp1234|14 years ago|reply
http://boingboing.net/2008/07/28/law-prof-and-cop-agr.html
The risk of self-incrimination is incredibly high since no person can even be aware of all of the laws that exist and may be violated.
[+] [-] dustingetz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkcomp|14 years ago|reply
http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/The-California-Law-That...
[+] [-] Alex3917|14 years ago|reply
[1] DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, Anandamide, etc.
[+] [-] vacri|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|14 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] exabrial|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noonespecial|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingkawn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpatru|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hadronzoo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hominem|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] forgotAgain|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tuoru|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bugsy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] georgieporgie|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maqr|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkn|14 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] jfoutz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chadp|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irons|14 years ago|reply
"Who could have predicted that breaking into people's voicemail was going to cause such a fuss?"
[+] [-] lhnn|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] brazzy|14 years ago|reply
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?