“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
– Tacitus
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I read a better quote from a Roman source, which translated as “Other lands have locusts- we have laws!”
“Dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.”
Don Colacho.(Link)
A plague of laws is also the result of a diverisifying culture. The less that a people in a given country agree on what constitutes right and wrong the more laws are enacted to spell out precisely how one should behave in a given circumstance.
How do you figure that? I think you will find an explosion in lawmaking in monocultural Germany in the 1930’s as that state entered its terminal derangement stage. No, a plague of laws is just a symptom of an over mighty state trying to square the perpetual circle of its contradictions.
Hey, Don Colacho – long time no see;-)
A plague of laws is also the result of a diverisifying culture.
If so, then the vast expansion of the U.S. tax code in the last forty years would reflect a diversifying culture. More likely, it represents rent-seeking by special interests seeking special favors and an endless battle between tax law writers trying to tax everything one way or another versus the accountants looking for new loopholes. We have reached the point where most Americans, incuding most Congressmen, hire tax preparers to file their federal income taxes. Along the way, we got a Secretary of the Treasury who failed to pay his full taxes and blamed it on a computer program, plus a chairman of the Congressional tax-writing committee whom the Congress censured for tax evasion which less powerful people go to prison for. Is this a diversifying culture or a tax code which serves the purposes of powerful people seeking greater power?
The profusion of laws during the New Labour period was an attempt by those in power to guarantee that their policies, preferences and prejudices became forever cemented into the foundations of government.
For this reason alone, the vast majority should be repealed.
The basic problem of the ever expanding and indeed accelerating growth of the statute books is the fact that the UK and most other countries are now ruled by an elite cadre of professional politicians, the vast majority of whom have done nothing outside the political sphere.
The only solution to this is to either have a mass repeal followed by the cutting down of parliamentary sittings to two days per quarter (i.e. 8-days per year).
Equally, the number of members should be reduced to about 10% of its current membership. By reducing the number of writers of parliamentary bullshit, we should (hopefully) slow the expansion of statute law.
However, none of this will happen “Before the Revolution”.
“The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.” – Frank Zappa
Man, what an awesome quote. Thanks.
I presume the reverse is true as well. I seem to remember hearing that in American society it is impossible to go through a day without breaking some law. Perhaps not a felony… but maybe so. Anyway, wouldn’t that knowledge, even if only unconsciously, tend to inure towards lawbreaking and the consequences? And doesn’t that too promote corruption? I mean, hey, everyone does it.
jdm wrote:
‘I presume the reverse is true as well. I seem to remember hearing that in American society it is impossible to go through a day without breaking some law. Perhaps not a felony… ‘
Actually, the seminal book on the matter is called ‘Three Felonies a Day’, by Harvey Silverglate
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594032556
and it’s a fascinating study of the exponential growth of both law and regulation.
This is the sort of process which ends with armed Federal agents arresting a man at gunpoint for having incorrectly decalled a FedEx package.
llater,
llamas
Just as I suspected, many protested my point and cited Nazi Germany-history’s greatest bogeyman and rightly so. However, to deny that cultural “diversity” plays no part in a plethora of lawmaking is just ignorance. There is more to a country than it’s financial aspect.
I usually ignore people who assume ‘ignorance’ is the cause of disagreement with them and I see no reason to make an exception in your case 🙂
I’d agree with you Perry, but I’m intrigued by this blanket accusation of ignorance. I await my edumification.
Tut Tut Perry, Thou are’t aging, tho’ smiling.
.
The missing point is to be found in a title known to us all:
LAW. LEGISLATION & LIBERTY
LAW is one thing; LEGISLATION (even tho’ it be given “the force of law”) is qutite another.
In “popular” governments of “representative” formats
diversity of interests does seem to produce a plethora of responses to the nature of those varying interests.
Them is the “Ausie Rules” for the present game with the current players – mate!
As for the U S, where I have been at the Bar for almost 60 years (and I was late to the party due to certain effects of WW II) I answered a question by a Judge on where the LAW had “gone off”- with.
“We no longer have a RULE OF LAW we now have a LAW OF RULES.”
How are things with LAW in the Mother Country?
Well you see, RRS, it’s like this. Mother Country was playing on the roof one day, and got too near the edge, and….
I sure hope that RRS knows the Newhart routine I’m paraphrasing here, or this is all just wasted space…
Valerie, I suspect Perry gave you the equivalent of a head-butt because you might be trying to make the rather dodgy argument that countries with more “diverse” – ie, ethnically mixed populations – are ones in which laws proliferate. Correlation is not causation, however.
The reason why laws have multiplied like hell in countries such as the UK has more to do with things such as the “public choice” problem whereby politicians and various lobby groups create pressure for ever greater and more pointless amounts of legislation. This process has happened in all different types of society in the West, albeit in varying degrees.
Maybe the main reason for the proliferation of legislation is time. Legislators write and pass new laws all the time, maybe out of boredom, or a feeling that they are supposed to do new laws, or an urge to save the planet, whatever.
But laws are never deleted or annuled, so they accumulate over time.
Old countries have more laws than new ones – and are also closer to decline.
The solution is simple, and I don’t see who might oppose it: put an expiration date on every law, say 10 or 15 years. Then, each generation of new legislators can legislate and feel good and important without adding to the grand sum of laws.
Another measure that could help is: reduce the length of parlamentary sessions.
A third measure is this: reduce the length of the laws. No more 2000 pages heath-reform laws. Maybe we could add an ammendment to the constitution that would say: “Congress shall pass no law that is longer than 5 pages”.
On the LAW OF RULES:
In addition to the plethora of legislation in the U S, which has been responsive to “constituency-building” by individual accessionaires to the political class (as the former functions of the party system decay), the general decline in the motivational quality of those individuals is producing legislation that consists principally of frameworks and authorization for the establishment of RULES (regulatory processes); thereby generating an Administrative State in which both the legislation and the resulting rules structures are sourced in, and determined by, the un-elected.
@ JACOB –
Perhaps an easier solution would be to divide all legislation (past and current) into categories.
Then provide (Constitutionally???) that legistaion in each respective category (and all rules or regulations appurtenant) expire 5, 10 and 20 years from enactment. Forcing review of all existing “laws” and the CFR would require expansion of the Congressional Research Offices, but that would be a small price to pay for some glorious “sunsets.”
Tacitus was correct – and he was not just plucking the idea of the top of his head.
He knew that one of the signs of decline in the Ancient Greek city states was the vast growth of legislation.
Instead of the law being about “to each his own”, the law had become about telling everyone (in detail) how to live.
Nothing to do with a more diverse culture – and everything to do with a changed role for the state.
Tacitus feared that the same thing was happening with Rome – and would eventually have the same effect it had with the Ancient Greek states.
And he was correct.
The Republic had been undermined by wicked fools such as Cato the Elder (who thought that good behaviour in life could be created by passing lots of laws governing everything – yet had no sense of real honour himself, as his campaign to wipe out Carthage by trickery – by false promises of peace combined with demands to disarm, showed).
And the process of decay (of personal honour being replaced by the commands of the state) had continued under the Empire.
It is a matter of principle.
When the first response to a problem is either “government must spend….” or “there should be new rules – tighter regulations….” (or both) then a society is in terrible trouble.
Yes – we are in terrible trouble.
By the way – if you want to know what a Res Publica should be……
Then listen to the speech of John Wayne’s character in “The Alamo”.
“Paul you are being absurd….”
Not at all – the speech would have been nodded at by Tacitus, and (long before him) by Cicero.
Public duty (being prepared to die in the defence of the Res Publica) combined with the knowledge that true civil society (what the Res Publica is about) is independent families (the family, not the state, being the moral educator of children – that is the Roman way, tradition and freedom not state education, and regulations governing every aspect of life), based on the just conduct of their members.
Just conduct meaning respecting the property rights of others – and defending those rights.
For the just man defends the property rights of others just as strongly (indeed perhaps more strongly) than he does his own.
And if such a defence means his own death.
So be it.
“Nothing to do with a more diverse culture – and everything to do with a changed role for the state.”
Exactly right, Paul.
Johnathon: You are correct, and Perry read it wrong, though I hardly stated my point clearly. Vested interests in the state are all for divide and conquer along racial or ethnic lines: thus, Affirmative Action, quotas, Sharia law, etc. I have yet to see ONE protest from the beneficiaries about the unjust nature of said laws, and to ignore the proliferation of legislation based on these concepts boggles the mind. If none of these aformentioned laws existed, one’s religion or ethnicity wouldn’t be worth mentioning: however, the state, in essence, codifies discrimination AND refers to it as necessary. AA, for example, (in the U.S.) is a mare’s nest of regulation.
Johnathon,
Thanks, Given the response I initially thought I had posted on DU or DailyKos. I’m referring to the special interest lobby of racial grievance and Sharia law supporters, Affrimative Action, et al. While these laws clearly can’t proliferate without the spinelessness of politicians, I certainly don’t see the “aggrieved” groups complaining about them either.
…and the more numerous the laws, the more nonexistent the law.
“The more corrupt the state, the more numinous the Government believe themselves to be …”