Democrats Against Laws
An unenforced law is just an unread memo
(My throat is still bugging me, and nobody’s listening to my podcast anyway, so here’s some of what I planned to say today.)
During a townhall event in Minneapolis, Ilhan Omar was squirted with a syringe full of liquid by a crazed protester.
Fortunately she was unharmed, so we know it wasn’t holy water.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the law.
Not any particular law, but the concept of law itself. The idea that a select few can write down rules that everybody else is supposed to obey, or else we’ll be punished.
Now, the ultimate deterrent in the enforcement of law is physical violence. If you run around your neighborhood beating people up, sooner or later the cops will stop you. (It might take a while, depending on the neighborhood.) If you can’t settle down, they’ll hurt you, or maybe even kill you.
Because society can’t function if everybody just goes around clobbering each other all the time. That’s why we need cops.
Even if you commit a non-violent crime, refusing to comply with the law persistently enough may earn you the attention of men with weapons and the legal right to use them on you. (Again, it depends on the neighborhood.) There can be no civilization without the inherent threat of force.
That unspoken threat used to be enough to maintain order. The system has never been perfect, and there will always be people who abuse the power they’ve been given. But some semblance of order was maintained. Society was able to function, because most people figured it just isn’t worth it to break the law.
I think modern life is destroying that. Or at least it’s giving people a bunch of new incentives to misbehave. In America, the average citizen has the ability to do more evil, more quickly, than any other society in the history of the world.
