Saturday
“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” Tacitus (A.D 55-130)
Whether in the US, UK, EU, Australia, New Zealand or Canada, social engineering is the dominant theme of our time. Dangerously daft legislation is being churned out by the regulators of the Western world.
Why is this?
Our politicians are a breed apart from most people. They consist of a combination of those who seek power, those who seek fame, those who seek status and, worst of all, those who believe that they understand what is right and wrong for all individuals and thus seek to tell us how to live our lives – backed by the force of law.
There are always a handful of decent people, but the vast majority are in the above categories in some combination or other. The common denominator is that all have ambition and wish to stand out, for this is the path to ascend the Party hierarchy.
There was a time when to ‘stand out’ in our various parliaments meant to be a brilliant orator, speaking to causes based on intellectual and moral substance.
Now, it is to be the person who crafts a new piece of legislation that passes into law, or, someone who is able to gather the party room votes to facilitate the passage of such. The latter obviously impacts the former, essentially making them one and the same. The only question really is who is able to get legislation passed? That person is the ascendant star. No matter the merit of the legislation.
This is the reason that our elected politicians are now called Legislators and Lawmakers. For this is precisely how they, and the media, see their role. Propose and pass legislation and you are a star; do not, and you are a failure.
So they pass legislation – as much as they can. As mentioned before “people build civilizations, governments destroy them. Regulations are the mechanism by which they achieve this.”
We live in an age where business is so smothered by regulations that it is choking. Not much more can be added lest it be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The same holds true for our common understanding of society. We can neither drink, eat, smoke, congregate or even joke free of myriad regulations.
So, for the ambitious politician to stand out required a new area for legislation. Thus, the move to the batty fringe of social engineering. There is no batty fringe to business; either the market supports a business or it goes bust. Batty businesses go bust briskly. The inhibiting factors with society are not so clear cut. The legislative powers of government can force people to act in ways and pretend to believe in things that they find abhorrent – up to a point.
I would make the case that we are now approaching that point. People will put up with an awful lot themselves; but are growing increasingly uneasy at the attempts to pervert their children.
They are bewildered by the demand of the loony-left that even worse social misfits be brought into the mainstream. When that bewilderment turns to anger, they will abandon, en masse, the traditional political parties. The US and Italy have led the way; others will follow.
It was not the gender-benders, feminists and others of their ilk who changed our societies, nor was it the supporting cast of the psychology departments and leftover ‘60s hippies. It was politicians themselves. They were not responding to genuine public demand, but responding to the need for self-aggrandizement. The loony-left, supporters of any cause that offends their imagined inferiors, the middle and working class, have been their gung-ho foot-soldiers.
It is the urge to regulate for its own sake that is the impetus behind the social engineering juggernaut.
It needs to be made clear to politicians that this is most certainly not their primary function. What is, does not even make their ‘to do’ list.
“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.” Frederic Bastiat
This cannot happen with the quality of people now in our parliaments. It requires a wholesale changing of the guard.
It would have been better had Tacitus phrased his quote (at top) in the reverse order to properly articulate cause and effect.
In their current manifestation as Lawmakers and Regulators, freed from both intellectual and moral restraint, politicians have become the very enemy that societies pay them so much to protect us from.