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In a free society, everything is permissible unless it is forbidden. In a non-free society, everything is forbidden unless it is permitted. When the laws are so
by dpatru 15y ago
In a free society, everything is permissible unless it is forbidden. In a non-free society, everything is forbidden unless it is permitted. When the laws are so numerous and complicated that the ordinary person does not know what is forbidden, a free society feels and functions like an un-free society.
A society under law means that people cannot be prosecuted by the whim of the authority, but only according to objective, written law. Yet even a society of written law can be under arbitrary rule if the laws are so numerous and complicated, that citizens do not know when they are breaking them, and if violations are so common that prosecutions and penalties are exacted based on police and prosecutorial "discretion."
Perhaps the legislature that pass the laws and the executive branch that lobbies for them have no idea of their cumulative effect, but I doubt it. They are not rubes. They are experts in the domain in the same way that experienced programmers are expert in theirs. They have to know that they are steadily transforming society from a free one, to one that is not free, from one that is ruled by law, to one that is ruled by men. Yet they don't care. The simplest explanation is that people who are attracted to government are people who want to control other people. If they weren't, if they valued freedom, they would refuse to create laws for the same reason that 37 Signals refuse to add features to their software: because while each individual law or feature may have merit, the cumulative effect is to destroy the more important value of freedom (or, in the case of software, simplicity.)
- cageface 15y agoCan you think of any examples of real-world "free" societies like the ones you describe? I can't.
- r00fus 15y agoSomalia?
- wisty 15y agoChina. Or anywhere else that's closer to the Napoleonic code (command and control laws) than the common law (custom-based laws). (Sorry, I'm not a lawyer, so my terminology might not be accurate). The problem is, the law is accountable to the government, not the other way round. I guess you could create a hybrid system, in which higher courts shape the morass of law and precedent into simple explicit codes for the citizenry and lower courts to follow. That might give you the best of both worlds, but it might have its own problems.
- dpatru 15y agoIt always has been and it's still the case in America that what is not prohibited is permitted. The problem is that in the last 70 years, the number of prohibitions have greatly increased. Technically we're still free; practically, there are fewer free domains available. The internet is one such domain, and that's why there is so much innovation here as compared to, say, banking or medicine.