The law has been utterly corrupted! Not only that, but those sworn to uphold the law have been defiled as well! I'm telling you right now that the law has not just been derailed from it's original purpose but has completely changed course! Now the law has become the weapon of choice for greed! Rather than punishing crime, the law has become a willing participant in the very evils it was designed to punish!
If this is true, it is most serious and I have a moral obligation to warn my countrymen of it.
Life Is a Gift from God
God gave us a gift which all others derive from. That gift is life: physical, intellectual and moral life.
But life is not self maintaining. God has given us the duty of preserving, developing and perfecting it. In order to succeed in this, we have been a given amazing facutlies and He has given us in the a variety of natural resources. By using our faculties with these natural resources we can turn these resources into products which we can then use. This process is vital to life proceeding as it should.
Life, senses, production-- in other words, individuality, liberty, property -- this is man. Despite the most creative politicians, these gifts predate all human laws and surpass them.
Life, liberty, and property don't exist because a bunch of politicians made laws about them. Not at all! In fact it was because of the fact that life, liberty and property existed that men had to make laws to protect them.
What Is Law?
So then, what is the law? The law is simply the organization of individuals to ensure their right to legal defense.
All of us have the natural right - given to us by God - to protect ourselves, our liberty and our property. These rights are fundamental to life and the protection of any one of these is dependant on the protection of the other two. After all, what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties?
If every person has the right to defend -- even by force -- his person, his liberty, and his property, then naturally a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force that would always protect these rights. And so the principle of collective right -- the reason it even exists and is lawful -- is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Therefore since an individual cannot legally use force against the person, liberty, or property of someone else, then the common force -- for the same reason -- cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.
Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our premise. Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who would then argue that force exists to destroy the equal rights of our brothers? Since no one person can legally use force to violate someone else's rights, doesn't it make sense that the same principle applies to a collective force which is essentially a group of individuals?
If this is true then it doesn't get any more obvious than this: The law is the organization of man's natural right to legal defense. It's a substitute of a collective force in place of individual forces. And this common force is only to do what the individual has a legal right to do: protect themselves, their liberty and their property; and to maintain the rights of the individual thus ensuring the reign of justice and peace over all.
A Just and Enduring Government
As far as I'm concerned, a nation grounded in such a premise would have a prevailing sense of order among it's citizens in thought and deed. It seems to me that such a nation would have the most simple, easy to accept, economical, limited, nonoppressive, just, and enduring government imaginable -- whatever its political form might be.
In such a situation everyone would know that they are personally responsible for all of their successes and downfalls. Nobody would have any complaints with the government so long as this person was respected, he wasn't forced to work, and his earnings were safeguarded from all unjust attacks. When he succeeded he wouldn't have to thank the government and when he failed he had nobody to blame but himself. After all a farmer can't blame the government for bad weather can he? The only way that the government would be involved would be in the protection of the rights of the individual.
Even better, if the state would stay out of things, we could pursue our own interests in a perfectly logical way. The poor wouldn't be asking to become literate before getting food. And we certainly wouldn't see people un-necessarily being relocated from rural areas to populate cites or vice versae. Nor would we see these huge displacements of money, work and population which is no doubt caused by legislative decisions and not by individual choice.
When the state creates such situations and displacements, the very sources of our livelihood are no longer certain and in fact unstable. Even more so, all this does is burden government with even more responsibilities.
The Complete Perversion of the Law
Unfortunately though law never regulates itself to only do what it's supposed to do. And when it goes beyond it's proper role, it isn't in a trivial manner. It is much worse than that; the law has begun to act in outright rebellion against it's sole task. The law has sought to destroy it's goals: It is used to obliterate the very justice it was meant to uphold; it restricts and destroys the rights it was meant to protect. The collective force has been given to corrupt men who desire nothing more - and with no consequence to them - to take advantage of the person, autonomy and property of everyone else. Theft has become a "right" in order to allow them to continue in their theft and has in turn condemned the act of lawful defense which in turn would make it punishable to defend ones self against this theft.
How did this happen? And what are the consequences.
It happened because of two things: stupid greed and pseudo-philanthropy. Let us begin by analyzing the first cause.
A Fatal Tendency of Mankind
Everyone wishes to preserve their life and improve it. And if people were free and unrestricted in such endeavors by the use of his faculties and assets, then such social progress would be unending, uninhibited and unfailing.
However, there is also a negative tendency to thrive at the expense of others whenever possible. This isn't just some irresponsible statement nor is it made with an attitude of despair and cynicism. History shows over and over again that this is true: unending war, mass migrations, religious persecution, universal slavery, unethical business, and monopolies. Such a desire is part of man's nature - his basic, natural, insatiable urge that compels him to fulfill his dreams in the least painful way possible.
Property and Plunder
Man can only satisfy his desires by working for them; by continually striving to the best of his abilities in conjunction with his natural resources. This process is where property originated.
It is also true however that his wants can be satisfied by stealing and using the fruits of someone else's labor. This is the origin of plunder.
Because man naturally wants to avoid pain - and work is itself pain - then clearly man will attempt to steal whenever theft is the easier option. This is very obvious in history. And when these conditions are present neither religion or morality will stop it.
So when does theft end? Logically, it stops when theft is more dangerous and painful than work.
It should be obvious then that law's proper role is to use it's power to stop this tendency to steal rather than work. Every aspect of law should safeguard one's property and punish theft.
Generally speaking though, one man or a class of men make the laws. Since law wouldn't be able to function without the sanction and support of a dominant force, this force has to be entrusted to those who create legisilation.
This fact, combined with the man's fatal tendency to be satisfied with the least amount of effort explains why the law invariably becomes corrupt. It should be easy to see now how the law changes from punishing injustice to becoming the unstoppable arbiter of injustice. And why a legislator uses the law to destroy to some extent among the people, their autonomy by slavery, their freedom by oppression and their property by theft. This is done only for the benefit of the legislator and is proportional to his degree of power. This is done solely for the benefit of the person who makes the law, and in proportion to the power that he holds.
Victims of Lawful Plunder
Naturally, man will rebel when they are victims of injustice. So when theft is orchestrated by law to profit those who make the law, those victims of legal plunder will try to become lawmakers themselves through either pacifistic or revolutionary methods. Depending on how enlightened these victims are, they will take one of two courses of action once they gain power: they will either try to crush legal plunder or they will try to benefit from it themselves.
Woe to the nation when those victims of legal plunder choose to pursue the latter option once they have legislative power!
Until then, the few steal from the many simply because the power to make laws is limited to few. But then let us assume that the power of law making becomes available to all men. Then those men will seek to make such theft apply to all men in order to balance things out. So rather than trying to fix these social injustices, the simply make them apply to everyone. The moment these victimized classes achieve power, they will develop a retributive system against other social classes. They won't end legal plunder. (That would require more enlightenment than they actually have.) No, instead they decide to imitate their own oppressors by doing the very same thing that they felt was an injustice to them.
It is as though before justice could rule that everyone would have to suffer cruel retribution - some for being evil and some for being stupid.
The Results of Legal Plunder
You couldn't hope to introduce a greater evil to society than changing the law into a tool for stealing from others.
What are results of such corruption? It would require volumes to describe them all. So let us simply focus on the most obvious results.
For starters, it destroys society's conscience of what the difference between justice and injustice is.
Society can't exist without a certain degree of respect for the law. The easiest way to do this is to make respectable laws. However when law and morality oppose each other a citizen has only the cruel choice of abandoning his own sense of morality or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are equally consequential, and how could a person choose between them? The nature of law is to maintain justice. This is so vitally important that people equate law and justice without any dissimilarity. We all have a natural tendency to assume that something legal is also right. This is prevelant that many people come to the wrong conclusion that things are right simply because the law says so. So, in order to make people think that theft is perfectly fine, all that needs to happen is for the law to say endorse it. It is this very reason that there are not only defenders of slavery, restrictions and monopolies that profit from these institutions but also from those that are the victims of such institutions as well.
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