In building laws we seek to enforce a deeper sense of what is good and moral about the world. Personal freedom and respect for human life (ones own and that of others) come together to form things like traffic laws, speed limits and so on.
Yet the problem with laws is that they are specific, they have to be! And there lies their Achille's heel! Nobody can predict all the situations in which a law is applicable and nobody can enforce all the laws all the time. It's really a constant battle between the ingenuity of people to find new loopholes and ways to circumvent the law and lawmakers trying to patch the law to make it applicable in new unforeseen situations and of law enforcement agencies to keep up with the ingenuity of people trying to avoid the law.
Companies like Goldman Sachs (situation in Greece) become adept at finding new loopholes in the laws; finding ways of doings things in contradiction with the spirit of the law but not with its letter!
Ultimately this situation leads to an ever increasing number of laws, which then require an ever increasing number of people to understand and apply the law, leaving those for whom law isn't their business faced with an ever more impossible task of keeping up with the ever increasing number of laws. Ultimately their will be too many lawyers and too many laws. Crippling society and grinding the whole system to a halt!
In the end what we need is not so much the law as the spirit of the law. Although we can't define all the instances where personal freedom would be infringed, we can quite easily decide on a case by case basis when personal freedom was infringed, and the situation can be corrected depending on whether there was foreknowledge, premeditation etc The problem with this line of thinking is that it requires a much stronger internal sense of right or wrong and a much stronger sense of responsibility than people are willing to accept. it's much easier to hide behind a law book saying 'I followed the law'. Ultimately it's a cowardly attitude, yet one we see everyday! Legalised corruption, legalised slavery, legalised abuse, legalised drug-pushing etc ... We all bow down to the huge monster that has become the law, forgetting the spirit of the law even when we wake up at night with the absolute certainty a wrongdoing was committed, yet no law was broken. Inversely we see regularly situations were a law was broken but no wrong was committed yet the person will be judged and sentenced for breaking a law while doing no wrong .. or maybe even good!
How long is the Law Monster going to carry on its march in the face of greater and greater demonstration of its tragic misdoings!
Yet the problem with laws is that they are specific, they have to be! And there lies their Achille's heel! Nobody can predict all the situations in which a law is applicable and nobody can enforce all the laws all the time. It's really a constant battle between the ingenuity of people to find new loopholes and ways to circumvent the law and lawmakers trying to patch the law to make it applicable in new unforeseen situations and of law enforcement agencies to keep up with the ingenuity of people trying to avoid the law.
Companies like Goldman Sachs (situation in Greece) become adept at finding new loopholes in the laws; finding ways of doings things in contradiction with the spirit of the law but not with its letter!
Ultimately this situation leads to an ever increasing number of laws, which then require an ever increasing number of people to understand and apply the law, leaving those for whom law isn't their business faced with an ever more impossible task of keeping up with the ever increasing number of laws. Ultimately their will be too many lawyers and too many laws. Crippling society and grinding the whole system to a halt!
In the end what we need is not so much the law as the spirit of the law. Although we can't define all the instances where personal freedom would be infringed, we can quite easily decide on a case by case basis when personal freedom was infringed, and the situation can be corrected depending on whether there was foreknowledge, premeditation etc The problem with this line of thinking is that it requires a much stronger internal sense of right or wrong and a much stronger sense of responsibility than people are willing to accept. it's much easier to hide behind a law book saying 'I followed the law'. Ultimately it's a cowardly attitude, yet one we see everyday! Legalised corruption, legalised slavery, legalised abuse, legalised drug-pushing etc ... We all bow down to the huge monster that has become the law, forgetting the spirit of the law even when we wake up at night with the absolute certainty a wrongdoing was committed, yet no law was broken. Inversely we see regularly situations were a law was broken but no wrong was committed yet the person will be judged and sentenced for breaking a law while doing no wrong .. or maybe even good!
How long is the Law Monster going to carry on its march in the face of greater and greater demonstration of its tragic misdoings!
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