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 or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
In my column of August 9th I defined my own coinage “lawhead” as “one who believes that man-made laws are actually based in objective reality like physical laws; he is unable to comprehend that the majority of laws are completely arbitrary, and therefore views a violation of a ‘vice law’ with the same horror that normal people reserve for rains of toads or spontaneous human combustion. Though lawheads are a minority of the population they are disproportionately represented in positions of power, with the result that once a law is on the books it cannot usually be removed by any means short of armed insurrection.” Lawheads are most dangerous when they work in close association with control freaks, those who know very well that laws are arbitrary but enact them anyway so as to have more excuses to threaten, intimidate, arrest, fine and imprison the citizenry.
These laws are usually designed with sufficiently diabolical cleverness so as to fool the Great Unwashed into thinking they do indeed have a basis in reality, especially when enacted in conjunction with a moral panic (such as “national security”, “child welfare” or the like). But even when they aren’t, there are sufficient numbers of lawheads around to ensure that these tyrannical laws are rarely, if ever removed. And even when they are, for every repressive statute which is struck down ten more have been enacted in the meantime. Governments don’t care HOW universal criminality is achieved, so long as it is; if it isn’t accomplished by prohibiting drinking it will be by banning smoking, and if not by forbidding homosexuality and abortion it’ll be by denying privacy and the right to self-defense. And as we’re seeing in many places, control freaks are equally happy demonizing our clients as they ever were demonizing whores. The important thing is to define as many people as possible as criminals, thereby inducing a social autoimmune disorder for which government can be touted as the cure though it is actually the cause.
One example of this were the Jim Crow laws designed to control free blacks in the latter half of the 19th century; all manner of things were made illegal for black people so that governments would have the excuse to monitor, harass and persecute them. But after the successes of the civil rights movement in the middle of the 20th century, government somehow succeeded in casting itself as the great savior of black Americans even though it was government which had created the laws which criminalized them in the first place. The Jim Crow laws were a clumsy attempt at control because they directly targeted one obvious segment of the population and thus A) did not intimidate everyone; and B) disallowed those in the targeted group any illusion of escape through “correct” behavior. By comparison, the anti-prostitution laws which proliferated a generation after the first Jim Crow laws affected almost 10% of women and 70% of men and were thus far more effective means off social control; a generation after that alcohol prohibition was even more efficient at creating criminals out of previously law-abiding citizens.
At the stroke of a pen, the 18th Amendment magically transformed tens of millions of ordinary Americans, no different from their neighbors, into criminals, and many millions of others lost respect for all law and authority due to the rigor with which the asinine prohibition law was enforced. Deprived of legal sources of alcohol Americans turned to those who could supply it, thus enriching true criminals (gangsters and smugglers) and enticing many who might not otherwise ever have crossed the line into the now-lucrative bootlegging market. Hundreds of thousands were blinded, paralyzed, and killed by poisonous moonshine or industrial alcohol because there was no longer supervision of product contents. Official corruption ran rampant, courts and prisons were clogged with people who were not considered criminals a few years earlier, federal police powers were dangerously expanded and civil liberties were bulldozed in order to enforce a law which was unjust and unenforceable to begin with, and billions were wasted on enforcement while billions more were lost in tax revenues.
This was, of course, utterly incomprehensible to lawheads; those who made statements on the subject in 1920 predicted that the law would magically remove the desire for liquor from the American mind. The Internal Revenue Service predicted that the law would be instantly effective, but that it would take six years for all existing private liquor supplies to be used up. And Prohibitionists both inside and outside the government questioned neither the ability to legislate state-defined morality into existence nor the rectitude of attempting to do so. And the fact that the so-called “Noble Experiment” failed miserably in less than a decade (calls for its repeal were widespread and vocal by 1929) did absolutely nothing to penetrate the thick skulls of lawheads and control freaks, who have in the intervening 80 years continued to support other prohibitionist bans and even foisted upon us a host of new ones.
Each of these bans – from marijuana to prostitution to pseudoephedrine – have had exactly the same effects: None of them have affected demand one iota, nor hampered those who wish to partake. All of them have enriched criminals and increased true crime and bloodshed. All of them have enticed millions who might not otherwise have committed crimes into participating in the lucrative black markets created by their prohibition. All have increased the danger to users or sellers of the banned product or service (and even to innocent bystanders), often to fatal levels. All have given rise to rampant corruption, overwhelmed court and prison systems, dangerously expanded governmental powers, negated civil liberties and billions wasted on enforcement and lost in tax revenues. And each has admirably accomplished what it was enacted to accomplish: the redefinition of large segments of the population from citizens to criminals, thus allowing government yet another excuse to deprive them of their rights, goods and freedoms.
Unfortunately the government’s surest road to domination of the populace is the call for public safety. Prostitutes are probably the most obvious victims of these excesses, but groups founded on public safety like MADD are even crossing the line into big government advocacy by morphing from anti-drunk-driving groups almost into neo-prohibition groups. Sadly that means one of two things: Either the government becomes a totalitarian state, or the pendulum swings back the other way after public outrage, resulting in a legal relaxation that can imperil the lives of many. Sadly the government’s nature is to use the clarion call of public safety to become ever larger and more intrusive. It’s up to the citizens to be vigilant to keep this from happening, but all too often, we are not. Just ask anyone who’s ever withdrawn more than $10,000 from a bank account and had the government monitor him for possible money laundering.
I call it “Prostitution of the Constitution” – our government’s sale of the principles this country was founded upon for their own nefarious purposes.
Consensual crimes are not crimes! According to common law, for a crime to take place there must be a victim. No victim = no crime. As far as I’m concerned, our government is locking millions of people behind bars each year for no moral reason whatsoever 🙁
KJ
My husband and I were just talking about that yesterday. Since a crime requires a victim, approaches to prostitution law nearly always define the client as a victim of the evil prostitute (the “Officer Michelle” philosophy) or the prostitute as the victim of the evil client (the Swedish Model). Obviously, both are nonsense. 🙁
Complete nonsense. Both involved are willing participants, no one is holding a gun to the other’s head! To call either a ‘victim’ is essentially saying that they are incompetent; incapable of making their own decisions.
The Leviatahn State will always find a way to find both a perpetrator and a victim as an excuse to keep us under suveillance. It’s nothing new. Sadly America has trended so far toward the establishment of Big Brother in almost every aspect of our lives it may be too late now to reverse course.
I’ve been reading a lot lately about fascism and the “ominous parallels”……
Of course, you realize that by being aware of this dominance of the state over every living thing (innocent or not), we are a radical fringe group.
Given a choice between the following which is better?
A. Knowing that you are being enslaved by the state but can’t do anything about it.
B. Being too ignorant to know you’re enslaved.
It seems a bit like having to choose between repeatedly hitting one’s self in the nuts with a hammer or not having any nuts at all.
To a woman, that’s an easy choice! 😀
LOL!
Well, not being a lovecraftian hero content in ignorance to protect me from insanity, I opt for knowledge of what’s going on around me. That gives me at least the chance to craft a way out–like the move to the Bahamas I’ve been contemplating.
“Lawhead” is a great coinage, Maggie; it translates perfectly the ‘radical’ inspiration of law enforcers that corresponds to what jurisprudence calls Legal Positivism, i.e. the school of thought according to which laws are a given, and totally independent in theory from morality or ethics (e.g., the actual existence of victims). In principle, legal positivists don’t claim that laws ‘must’ be obeyed, no matter how unconnected they are to actual ethics–they claim it’s an independent question–, but I imagine it’s so easy to jump from “laws are a given” to “laws must be obeyed” that many people do it in practice. Everything can be idolized, and thereby lose that which had initially made it a good idea. 🙁
Of course, the big problem is that lawheads believe there are victims: in prohibitionist days, the alcoholics, their families, and the people they kill (with gangster liquor peddlers as the victimizers). The same for marijuana. The one curious thing with prostitution is that both the prostitute and the client can be seen as either victim or victimizer, depending on one’s theory. Plus, of course, the fact that in other prohibitionist attempts the act itself was targeted — people were supposed to stop drinking, or consuming drugs — whereas with prostitution the act itself is of course permitted if free of charge, i.e. it is the selling that is considered wrong. Even other sexual laws — e.g., against sodomy — targeted the act itself, not its selling. These two features are probably related: it’s because the selling, not the act, is seen as wrong that either party can be seen as the victim: much as in other commercial exchanges, both parties meet more or less as equals, and either party could be trying to fool the other (as in any commercial/contractual relation).
So the fight becomes one about whether there are victims, and where they are. “Here’s a victim!” claims the prohibitionist, presenting a lacrimous saved/redeemed prostitute as evidence. “That’s why we’re right!” The emotional impact, the sobbing confessions of exploitation, the promises that the silent suffering victims will at last be avenged… And then the uphill battle of actually using less emotionally strong evidence from reality to counter that. To counter the claim that they are “allowing countless victims to be mercilessly smashed to smithereens by the cogwheels of the sex industry, their dreams betrayed, their bodies befouled and vilified, their souls stifled and silenced, their hearts devoured by angry wolves…” Even the old alcohol prohibition rhetorics can be made to fit: “Think of the marriages and families destroyed, the reputations thrown in the mud, the good Christian souls condemned to an eternity in hell, all for a moment’s pleasure! And they claim it’s a victimless crime! Even if you have no compassion for the poor prostituted woman, think of all that!”. The Witchfinder General would be proud.
One hopes that more information will change that. Keep up the good work!
I’m hearing Ayn Rand’s name a lot these days.
Yeah, consensual crimes should not be crimes. It costs too much, it’s ineffective, and it ruins many more lives than the alcohol/prostitution/drugs/porn ever does.
“Of course, the big problem is that lawheads believe there are victims”
And the bigger problem is that they never count the victims of the law – which include not only the “law” breakers, but their families, victims of wrong-address raids, victims of crooked cops, everyone stopped and searched because they fit a profile, taxpayers who have to pay for more and more cops, prisons, and prison guards, …
“But after the successes of the civil rights movement in the middle of the 20th century, government somehow succeeded in casting itself as the great savior of black Americans even though it was government which had created the laws which criminalized them in the first place. ”
Wow! Someone agrees with me. When I say things like that I am usually braned a “racist”.
Only a statist with a willful ignorance of history could claim otherwise. Civil rights for black people were won by black people themselves and their white supporters, not “granted” by a benevolent government. If the government could have crushed the civil rights movement without granting a single right or causing widespread rioting, it would have done so…just as it’s doing now.
Black people themselves and their white supporters forced government to do what it was supposed to have been doing all along: safeguard the rights of human beings, whatever race they may happen to be. No, government is not benevolent, but government is how we as a society both protect our rights and, far to often, cripple them.
Considering ‘the government’ to be a coherent entity in this context is ridiculous. Brown vs Board of Education, say… was that done strategically to maximize governmental control?
Sadly enough, I’ve heard that very claim: that it was a sly trick to take rights away from the states and thus let the feds rule us all.
Something I’ve been meaning to point out: it was not the same government which created segregation as the one that ended it. I think I’ve just #$%@ed up the grammar, but it’s an important thing to remember. The people who made up the government were different, and even the Constitution itself had been amended several times.