Have You Committed Your Felony Today?
So. How many federal crimes have you committed today? None, you say? You're a law abiding citizen in good standing, right? That's a ridiculous question to ask, isn't it? Or is it? A recent study indicates that the average law abiding citizen, like you and me, on average commits at least three felonies daily. That can't be, you say. But it's true. In the last five years, the federal government has added over 400 new crimes to the already staggering four thousand or so currently on the books, according to a report to the House Judiciary drafted by the Congressional Research Service. These are mostly expansions or broader interpretations of existing laws, which lowers thresholds for breaking them. Some new expansions are troubling; far broader interpretations of mens rea laws, or guilty minds, for example, smack of Minority Report-like thought crimes.
Is crime really that rampant that we need fifty new federal felonies per year for the last thirty years? Well no. In fact, violent crime is down in America, across the board, spanning two decades. In 2009 the Justice Department announced that the incidence of reported rape had hit a 20-year low. Homicides are down, as are juvenile violence and crimes committed against children. Crime rates have been plummeting since the early 1990s to such an extent that explaining the drop has become something of an obsession among criminologists and sociologists. And that trend continues even today. But what may be good for society isn't necessarily good for law enforcement. Recently, John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, wrote that, as an extreme departure from English common law, upon which our legal system is based, police now use financial gain as a justification for defining criminal activity and incarceration.
What's worse is that federal prosecutors are by law immune to indemnity as they partake in the over-criminalization of American citizens. They can drag anyone through the system, any time and for any reason, essentially destroying folks at the least, or incarcerating them for years at worst - without any threat of liability, no matter how egregious their conduct. We're not talking about Edward Snowden-esque security leaks here - we're talking about things like Amish farmers going to jail for selling their own farm produced raw milk to neighbors.
So the evidence continues to mount that we indeed live in a police state. But how did we get to this point? Not only is criminalization expanding socially, but in commerce as well. Clearly the cause of this expanding crimes against the state philosophy is the trend away from a philosophy of laissez-faire. The Economist, in a recent article titled Over-regulated America, agrees. Two forces make American laws too complex. One is hubris. Many lawmakers seem to believe that they can lay down rules to govern every eventuality. Examples range from the merely annoying (eg, a proposed code for nurseries in Colorado that specifies how many crayons each box must contain) to the delusional (eg, the conceit of the infamous Dodd-Frank bill that one can anticipate and ban every nasty trick financiers will dream up in the future). Far from preventing abuses, complexity creates loopholes that the shrewd can abuse with impunity.
The other force that makes American laws complex is lobbying. The government's drive to micromanage so many activities creates a huge incentive for interest groups to push for special favors. When a bill is hundreds of pages long, it is not hard for congressmen to slip in clauses that benefit their cronies and campaign donors. The health-care bill included tons of favors for the political correct and the vocal radicals. Congress's last, failed attempt to regulate greenhouse gases was even worse.
How many felonies do you think are created in just the Affordable Health Care Act, and the Dodd-Frank Act alone? No one else knows, either, because both are deliberately open to broad interpretation, and that leads to prosecutorial discretion. See ya in jail!
Is crime really that rampant that we need fifty new federal felonies per year for the last thirty years? Well no. In fact, violent crime is down in America, across the board, spanning two decades. In 2009 the Justice Department announced that the incidence of reported rape had hit a 20-year low. Homicides are down, as are juvenile violence and crimes committed against children. Crime rates have been plummeting since the early 1990s to such an extent that explaining the drop has become something of an obsession among criminologists and sociologists. And that trend continues even today. But what may be good for society isn't necessarily good for law enforcement. Recently, John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, wrote that, as an extreme departure from English common law, upon which our legal system is based, police now use financial gain as a justification for defining criminal activity and incarceration.
What's worse is that federal prosecutors are by law immune to indemnity as they partake in the over-criminalization of American citizens. They can drag anyone through the system, any time and for any reason, essentially destroying folks at the least, or incarcerating them for years at worst - without any threat of liability, no matter how egregious their conduct. We're not talking about Edward Snowden-esque security leaks here - we're talking about things like Amish farmers going to jail for selling their own farm produced raw milk to neighbors.
So the evidence continues to mount that we indeed live in a police state. But how did we get to this point? Not only is criminalization expanding socially, but in commerce as well. Clearly the cause of this expanding crimes against the state philosophy is the trend away from a philosophy of laissez-faire. The Economist, in a recent article titled Over-regulated America, agrees. Two forces make American laws too complex. One is hubris. Many lawmakers seem to believe that they can lay down rules to govern every eventuality. Examples range from the merely annoying (eg, a proposed code for nurseries in Colorado that specifies how many crayons each box must contain) to the delusional (eg, the conceit of the infamous Dodd-Frank bill that one can anticipate and ban every nasty trick financiers will dream up in the future). Far from preventing abuses, complexity creates loopholes that the shrewd can abuse with impunity.
The other force that makes American laws complex is lobbying. The government's drive to micromanage so many activities creates a huge incentive for interest groups to push for special favors. When a bill is hundreds of pages long, it is not hard for congressmen to slip in clauses that benefit their cronies and campaign donors. The health-care bill included tons of favors for the political correct and the vocal radicals. Congress's last, failed attempt to regulate greenhouse gases was even worse.
How many felonies do you think are created in just the Affordable Health Care Act, and the Dodd-Frank Act alone? No one else knows, either, because both are deliberately open to broad interpretation, and that leads to prosecutorial discretion. See ya in jail!
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