Law as we know it cannot govern free people, but must transform them into "law-abiding citizens," obliged to yield judgment to the supremacist authority of the law. I mean no insult to ethical lawyers or honest judges.

Ideally, the law would step in when reason fails: the law settles disputes with force. In the process, the law preempts the right of the law abiding to react in self-defense. The law presumes to solve conflicts with authority separated from reason and judgment, and takes pride in this; it discourages our reliance on reason or personal responsibility. In a courtroom, the show of reason is gossamer: legal proceedings appear reasonable, but hearings and trials merely determine how to apply the law, and the law decides guilt or innocence, punishment or acquittal. Law may serve justice incidentally if administered well, but the primary concern of the law must remain its own "reason for being:" law may perpetrate injustice for the sake of self-preservation, and acquit the guilty or condemn the innocent for the sake of set precedent. Above all else, the law assures its own authority.

We're entrapped in a sticky net of ready-made laws: seat belt laws, gun laws, drug laws; laws to protect employees, tenants, minorities, children, law enforcement; laws to assure traffic safety, public health, child welfare. America should be the safest society on earth; it's hard to imagine one more thoroughly regulated. Strangely, the U.S. boasts the largest percentage of citizens in prison of any nation, so I hear; most of them political prisoners serving time for crimes created by legislators. American states aren't so united anymore: Hawaii desires sovereignty; there's talk of secession all around, even in Vermont: New Hampshire will soon become home to Free State Project activists. We're stuck like flies to a downward spiraling flypaper War on Terror with no legitimate beginning or end in sight, and the rest of the world apparently wishes America would go to h…

A coarse net of laws can capture lions, wolves, and sharks: small fish, mosquitoes, mice, and rabbits slip through. Lions and sharks don't breed prolifically like mosquitoes, mice, or rabbits, so more laws pass; the mesh of laws grows finer in an effort to catch them too. As the mesh gets thinner, lions and sharks easily tear holes in it and escape, while small fry get and stay caught. Not long ago, I'd suspected that law merely existed for the sake of loopholes, but maintaining that belief necessitated unfairly suspecting too many well meaning people of malicious intent: that was too easy a theory to entertain long in the face of a complex, convoluted, highly evolved, and largely corrupt legal system.

Now I think loopholes exist simply because the law (as we know it) gradually changes from coarse canvas to sheer gauze: the nature of the creature that gets trapped by laws reflects the evolutionary progress of the law. If the sharks and the lions can claw or chew their way out, many of the small critters will follow them, despite the large number left struggling in the net. The law that set out to trap only the predator snares all manner of creatures, and the weakest suffer in the end, while the predators prosper; the law survives even though it serves a purpose directly at odds with its original intention. Too bad Charles Darwin didn't devote his attention to the evolutionary process of law, I say.

Ready-to-apply law doesn't fit a given legal case any better than ready-to-wear clothing fits any one person: The law issues uniform sentences that fit if the applicant is fortunate. The law invents crimes; while few people would arrest a neighbor for smoking pot or driving without a seat belt, we pay the state tax money to arrest them and house them in jail. No decent neighbor would kidnap children away from parents next door because they home school kids, or fail to dope them on Ritalin, but few protest when the state does that with our tax dollars. Who benefits from criminalizing more and more of our personal activities and choices? Who ultimately suffers, and subsidizes the malignant growth of state power? In failing to mind our own business, and allowing (or expecting) the government to intervene in anyone else's personal affairs, we the people play traitor to our individual interests. Government grows at our expense; we nurture it at our peril.

Government uses regulation like a vine to grow up and out, wherever it can take hold: Bureaucracy that springs up around the law weakens the society on which it grows and feeds, the way a vine or a fungus eventually chokes or kills a tree. Government waxes richer and more powerful, as the power and wealth of the people wane: man's law must someday give way to nature; the concept of government includes a natural law provision for planned obsolescence. Bureaucracy can't grow and feed forever without starving its host population: it thrives when willing and able to limit itself. The popular theory that "limited government is good government" arises from the observation that people fare far better in coexistence with a limited government than a boundless bureaucracy.

The issue of gay marriage presents a good case study. People who believe in the sanctity of heterosexual marriage for religious reasons generally expect the state to sanctify or "bless" marriages: Silly me; I thought God was invited to do that, not the government. What business has the state in interfering with the most intimate of personal contracts at all? Creating a bureaucratic institution of marriage has done far more to destroy family values and disenfranchise people from tradition than alternative lifestyles, in my view. Allowing government to regulate marriage undermines relationships as insidiously as the state's involvement in schooling has eroded education, and society at large suffers the consequences. When marriage takes on the allure of voluntary jail time, only hopeless romantics, state sycophants, and idealists will marry: that'll work wonders for population growth and the political landscape, since marriage offers planned parental advantages.

Be careful what you advocate for, you might get it. When the law decides what we're free to do, we're not free: law doesn't limit itself, it limits our liberty. Laws restrain us in an artificial or mechanical sense, but laws cannot take the place of organic respect, reason, and honor between free people: laws usurp that position, disabling the people's facilities to exercise personal and social responsibility and equitably resolve differences. Government strives to empower itself; it thrives by taking power away from the people.

If laws benefited the people, we'd benefit from fewer laws. If laws kept the people safe from predators, we wouldn't see predatory legislators and lobbyists scrambling over each other to buy the next round of legislation: their vices remain legal, acceptable, and even profitable. Go figure. Simply put: more laws equal less liberty; more regulations allow fewer choices; more choice means greater freedom; more freedom takes fewer prisoners.

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