Laws Mean Violence

From Armstrong Economics, Police Bust Down Doors with Guns Drawn to Take a Toddler Because of a Fever.

This entire incident was over a toddler who was unvaccinated, who they thought had a fever. They had guns drawn, and as always, they are not afraid to use them if they’re met with any resistance. In the process, they took all three kids into custody and handcuffed the father.

The common belief that permeates our national political discourse is that things will be better if only we can just pass the right set of laws. The left are maniacal about this, and the right is hardly immune. Constant bickering about which laws are bad and which are good, as if the penultimate goal of society is to get the right words written into the right books. (We are quite aware that the Soviet Union had a very liberal, humanistic Bill of Rights, which they ignored.) Our way of understanding things is that the specific laws don't matter all that much. Much more important are the morality and IQ of the populace, and our ability to promote the right people to decision-making positions. The left believe that more laws equates to a better society. We disagree fully with that. Mike Huckabee likes to say that "the size of government is inversely proportional to the morality of the people." More laws is what programmers would call a bad smell. It is a clue that something is rotten underneath. Consider that Japan runs a very orderly society with very few laws or lawyers. Consider also that the country with the most lawyers per capita is the US, followed closely by notoriously corrupt Brazil. (Similarly, the US boasts the most prisoners per capita, followed by El Salvador and then a long list of backwaters countries.) The first of those links contains a nugget of ancient wisdom:

"In a state where corruption abounds laws much be numerous." Cornelius Tacitus, historian, 95 AD.

When it comes to laws, it is the enforcement that matters most. When police are corrupt, more laws means more opportunity for tyranny through selective enforcement. It means they can imprison anyone at any time, because the odds are strong that some law has been broken at some point. It's why Mueller was able to shake down Trump's people. The left will take his token prosecutions as validation that the operation was justified, before returning to arguing that blacks are over-represented in prisons because of system racism in the justice system. Generally, everyone knows that rules are selectively enforced, but pretends otherwise whenever convenient.

Law enforcement means violence. There is no other way. Usually we can get away with the just the threat of violence, but not always. Some people like to pass laws requiring every child to be vaccinated. It sounds nice...a utopian world where every child is safe from disease. They don't like to pass laws where children are torn away from their parents at the barrel of a gun, but the enforcement aspect is rarely considered by cloud people. Public policy has become not an exercise of creating the optimal impact on the world, but in writing the most fanciful and feel-good legal fiction. They are writing fairy tales, more or less, and their narrative creeps ever further away from reality.