Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

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"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."

- Ayn Rand

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.

http://mobile.avclub.com/philadelphia/articles/flash-mob-fal...

  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.

> 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.

I don't get it: Arresting/picking up black teenagers in a large city simply because of their skin color would be racist, would it not? Isn't that exactly what the policeman is saying?

Your belief that targeting black teenagers in general would of course lead to the arrest of the specific (unidentified) perpetrators doesn't sound all that likely to me.

Read the full article. The policemen said they would not arrest the kids in the mob who had attacked them, despite multiple eyewitnesses pointing out this mob, ostensibly because of the lack of individual identifiability, but in reality because the policemen were afraid of being demagogued as "racists".

Easier to punish the guy digging up arrowheads.

I read the article. Directly before the excerpt you quoted, as related by the same individual, you have the following quotes:

a) "Most of the kids had left", b) "obviously at that point the people who had attacked you guys had run off"

So how, exactly, were the police to arrest the attackers?

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.

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.)

Can you think of any examples of real-world "free" societies like the ones you describe? I can't.

China. 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.

It 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.

Somalia?

I think it's a perfectly apposite quote. No, the proliferation of laws is not there as the result of an evil conspiracy to make everyone guilty of something. But sometimes you can clearly illustrate harmful side effects in fiction by postulating evil conspiracies that do things for the sake of the harmful side effects.

Nobody knows the law anymore. Everyone is guilty of something. If the police want to arrest you, they can find some charge or another. Who has power in a world like that? Why, the person who decides whether or not to prosecute you for a law that thousands or millions of other people are breaking.

>>But sometimes you can clearly illustrate harmful side effects in fiction by postulating evil conspiracies that do things for the sake of the harmful side effects.

I'd say that by postulating an evil conspiracy that does things for the sake of harmful side effects, you are obscuring the mechanism that produces the harmful side effects in the real world. People have a tendency anyway to see agents that execute plans instead of faceless systems that happen to produce certain effects.

Of course, evil conspiracies might still make for good fiction, but stories like that usually don't do as well at offering insights as they could, because a large portion of readers will be misled into thinking there really is a conspiracy.

Nobody knows the law anymore. Everyone is guilty of something.

This argument is reductio ad absurdum. The corpus of law bearing significant consequences for violators [1][2] is sufficiently small as to be almost intuitively understood by any reasonably educated person.

As a general rule, you're not going to be confronted by the full weight and force of the state for violating the jaywalking statute. Were you to be targeted for arrest for such a minor violation, it would be transparent to knowledgeable observers that you were specifically targeted and surveilled until a reason was found to arrest you.

[1] By significant, I mean incarceration and/or crippling financial penalties. And note that the cost of defending oneself is categorically not a penalty. [2] This, of course, only applies to societies ruled by law, as opposed to those ruled by individual persons or groups

I'm too tired to find the reference, but some woman recently got sentenced to serve 90 days (thereabouts) incarceration for planting a garden in her front lawn in contradiction to local ordinances. Of course this is a prime example of civil disobedience, as she intentionally flaunted this absurd law, challenged it as best she could in court, then paid the price of losing.

The point is, you can be tossed into the clink for just about anything if you are brazen enough to openly challenge the law and don't prevail. Judges don't care much for the proles challenging the state.

She wasn't sentenced. The charges were dropped either because the city didn't want the negative publicity or because the case would not have held up.

http://moneyland.time.com/2011/07/15/charges-dropped-against...

What if all laws (except for the Constitution) automatically sunsets after a period of time, say, 20 years?

The job of the legislation is to create laws, by definition. So is it any wonder we end up with an accumulation of laws, some outdated? With an automatic sunset of all laws, this keeps the legislation busy without burdening us with an accumulation of outdated laws.

If it's really important, let the law be renewed after twenty years.

What would be good would be to have new laws sunset over a shorter period of time, say 5 years, and then they would renew for a longer period of time each time they were renewed.

Kind of like a generational garbage collector.

Reducing laws means reducing the bureaucracy supporting their enforcement. This is a powerful counter-incentive. This would never be discussed in public, but will induce lots of rationalizations.

Example: When Prohibition of alcohol ended, the regulating agency faced serious reductions in staff. Funny, severe restrictions on firearms (NFA) were enacted right about the same time - and guess which body was assigned oversight and enforcement?

Bureaucratic inertia. Who in their right mind would advocate their own good job be cut? Another example: the DEA broadcasts insane propaganda to justify itself while turning a deaf ear to real solutions for the withering violence on the Mexican border. It's infected.

"withering violence on the Mexican border"

You _are_ aware that the BATF and other agencies have been facilitating that violence, right? Google "Operation Fast And Furious", then consider how that contributes to ever-growing bureaucracy.

I don't disagree with what you wrote, but I too got tripped up on "cash in on guilt". I read it twice before deciding it doesn't mean cashing in on a person's inner turmoil, but rather exploiting the fact that the person is legally guilty.

The quote is much more sensible under that interpretation.

In context, I think it means the former. Not having the context available, your interpretation of the remarks at hand might make more sense.

However, a motif of Rand's is to moralize about capitalism and individuality. One of the themes, of which I think the current quote is an example, is that people have been trained to feel bad about their selfish impulses. Rand viewed the laws of her time as an outgrowth of the "evil" of altruism. As such, their "power" comes not just from being enforced, but from being held out as altruistic norms and carrying the moral weight that goes beyond their mere enforcement. As ludicrous as that sounds, I think I disagree with you and find it even more ludicrous that the antagonist actually wants to incarcerate people. To what end?

Also, the antagonist explicitly disavows that he want the laws obeyed, and also that they are even meaningful. He's trying to get people to live in fear.

> I think I disagree with you and find it even more ludicrous that the antagonist actually wants to incarcerate people. To what end?

The point is not to incarcerate people, but rather to gain leverage by being able to credibly threaten incarceration. This is standard operating procedure for prosecutors and police when dealing with confidential informants in drug cases. It's not such a stretch to think it may also happen in other cases.

I think you're missing a crucial "way things work" here...

Yes, a lot of these things happen through more-or-less the path of least resistance... Sure. But that doesn't mean there's a certain consciousness, a certain awareness among those who allow, who occasionally guide things this way.

I'm way, way on the other of the spectrum from Rand and have no use for her politics in general.

But this particular quote is a fine description for bureaucrats of all pin-stripes, all cardigans and all suits. No one would ever say this but they feel the awareness that proliferating laws give them power against nearly everyone when nearly everyone breaks the laws. And that power, of course, can used against whoever criticizes, annoys or stands against them.

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