Spin Dry

"Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made." - Otto von Bismarck

You probably don't often think about where laws come from, and yet they effect you every day -- park in the wrong spot, get caught by a traffic cam, fail to file your taxes, you'll feel the proverbial long arm of the law. Every time you buy something, someone collects sales tax, which is prescribed by law. And, technically, if you buy something in a state you don't live in and don't pay the sales tax when you bring it home, you break the law.

Of course, every one of us probably breaks a dozen laws a day without knowing it. That's part of life with a bureaucracy. As Robert Anton Wilson describes it in the Illuminatus! Trilogy, whatever is not prohibited is compulsory. Fasten your seatbelts and put on your helmets.

But, really, where do laws come from? The short answer is that they are a shared hallucination. Laws are just words on paper and, ultimately, are only as effective as the people's willingness to follow them. The longer answer is that the hallucination is enforced by threat -- threat of confiscation, threat of encarceration, threat of harm. Laws may be created by those people we call lawmakers, but without an enforcement arm -- i.e., the police -- the laws would be meaningless. And without the people's fear of that enforcement, the whole system would fall apart.

But... who are the lawmakers, anyway? That's the question people don't ask themselves nearly enough. The answer is simple. They are our employees. We "hire" them (via election) and we pay them (via taxes). But, as bosses, we abrogate our duty, because we rarely discipline them for passing stupid laws.

It's kind of funny, because if things worked in the private sector the same way they did between the people and the government, we'd scream bloody murder. Imagine this scenario...

You're hired by a company for which five people make such decisions. Two of them really like you, two of them hate you, and the fifth doesn't really like you but hates the other applicant. Then, once you get the job, instead of doing the job you were hired for, you take it on yourself to start changing company policies. You decide that the hiring powers can't have their own parking places, they have to pay you when they get to work late, and so forth. Then, you show up for work when you want to, miss important meetings, don't follow your bosses' directives at all. In the real world, how long would such an employee last? Not long at all.

And yet... in the world of government, this is exactly how elected officials behave once they're hired by us. The recent to-do over Virginia's "No Saggy Pants" law is a perfect example. Some legislator got a wild hair up his ass and mananged to pass a law that would fine people whose underwear was showing. Luckily, cooler heads in the state Senate prevailed, and the bill did not become a law. But, in theory, a legislator could get any stupid idea in their head and get a law passed and, thanks to the public not doing their job, not have to worry about job security.

People love to complain about the law, but seem to hate to do anything about it. And yet, the grassroots have real power. The Virginia No-Sag law did not pass the Senate precisely because there was such an uproar over it in the online community. By he time it got to the upper house, they realized they'd look really stupid if they allowed it to become law, and so they killed it.

And yet... where was the uproar when this administration (and yes, the President is your employee, too) lied us into a war? Where is the uproar as they start to plant their fake excuses for wars against Iran ("They have nukes!") and Syria ("They killed the prime minister of Lebanon!")? Despite anything Der Propogandasminister Karl Rove tries to tell you, the President is bound by law, and the law says that only Congress can declare war. Therefore, at the next hint of war, the outcry should be so shrill that no elected official in their right mind would vote for it. All it takes is phone calls and letters. Cheap, quick and easy.

Remember that when W starts pushing for an invasion of Iran. Or Syria. Or North Korea. And remind yourself -- stopping another imperialistic invasion, another mass slaughter, another quagmire, is much more important than letting the youth of Virginia show off their underwear.