AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS ADDICT

In a recent article by George Will titled, How to proceed when everything is a crime?, he says there are “an estimated 4,500 federal criminal statutes – and innumerable regulations backed by criminal penalties… The presumption of knowledge of the law is refuted by the mere fact that estimates of the number of federal statutes vary by hundreds.”

The unelected bureaucrats in regulatory agencies have piled rule on top of rule, and congress, which created these regulatory agencies, has abdicated its law making responsibility to them, and won’t use its power to rein them in. With the amount of laws that are on the books, almost everyone has broken some obscure law without even knowing it.

It is said that, “ignorance of the law is no excuse”, but if it is impossible to know, let alone understand every law, how can you be held responsible for not being able to do the impossible.

Thomas Sowell has defined the rule of law and freedom  as such.

“THE RULE OF LAW–Rules known in advance, applied generally, and constraining the rulers as well as the ruled.”

“FREEDOM–Exemptions from the power of the rulers and a corresponding limitation on the scope of all laws, even those of democratically elected Governments.”

As more laws that get passed, we move farther away from the rule of law, and closer to a point where we lose our individual freedom. Our only chance of turning this around is to get people to understand that individual freedom is in their best interest, and when government doesn’t abide by the rule of law it becomes the enemy of individual freedom and must be stopped.

Related Article – Individual Liberty Is The Least Contentious Way Of Settling Differences, at austrianaddict.com.

Related Article – Thomas Sowell, “The Point Of No Return?“, at austrianaddict.com.

This entry was posted on April 15, 2015 at 1:03 am and is filed under Government and Politics. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: George Will, Ignorance Of The Law, Individual Freedom, Individual Freedom Decreases, Laws Increase, The Rule of Law, Thomas Sowell