Would you rather live without the law?

originally posted by: Aliian

originally posted by: Semicollegiate

Law is a way to keep life reasonably safe and predictable.

Every new law is an attempt to overturn an already existing law.

As a rule of thumb, new laws are an expansion of government. Old laws are traditional ways of resolving or preventing disputes.

Since life today is different than it was for the 10,000 years preceding the industrial revolution, perhaps some new laws are needed. But maybe not. For instance, prompt enforcement of private property laws would have prevented a lot of pollution.

The reason why we introduce laws is because we want the change the environment.

We want to remove the rights from those that have them now, and give those rights to
others who do not have them.

We introduce laws, to shift the rights around.

All of that is law abuse. Good laws reflect the way normal people already live. The only way to get rid of a bad law is for everyone to ignore it. Writing new laws will always have unintended consequences. And then more laws to deal with that, and then more unintended consequences from the laws written to deal with unintended consequences of the first new laws, and then more unintended etc...


Human beings live in the future as well as the present. All human action is taken on a prediction about the future. Will the hamburger in your hands still be in your hands when it gets to your mouth? Yes, but that is still in the future for a time. Laws make the future more predictable, and so make the future more human.

Human Action, a book that should be in everyone's top ten, by Ludwig von Mises, talks about that and just about everything else too. Human Action is a book about everything.

Isaac Newton said of learning, When I got to a part in the book I couldn't understand, I started over from the first page.

I listen to Human Action on audiobook. I have started it over dozens of times, mostly because I like to hear the interstinger parts over.

A major theme is that society is the result of natural activity. Socialism, collectivism and big government attempt to impose how people should act in order to fit into a system (unnatural), over recognizing how people do act and letting behavior dictate the conditions of society and economics.