Law and Outlaw

Unsurprisingly, the head of the FBI decided not to recommend prosecution of Hillary Clinton and her operatives to the Department of Injustice.  Lynch had already said she would accept the FBI recommendation – because, despite Comey’s denials – she knew what was coming and told Bill Clinton during their 30-minute meeting in his airplane last week.  To announce this decision on the day after our patriotic “Independence Day” celebrations is just one more slap in the face to people who believe in liberty. 

If you or I failed to do our best to protect classified documents, we would go to jail.

When the laws that apply to the citizens do not apply to their ruling class, we have a pretty good definition of tyranny.

 When the police operate under a different set of laws than the peasants, you have a police state. 

When laws can be selectively enforced by the whim of those in power, being a law-abiding citizen loses its meaning.

 

Or, perhaps, it changes its meaning.  To be law-abiding now means to be a subject, a slave to those who make the laws.  Everything the colonists objected to was a law.  Slavery was law.  Jim Crow was law.  Prohibition was law. 

Laws do not make things right.

Eminent domain is a law.  Seizure of property and freezing of assets without due process is the law.  Restrictions on ownership of firearms are laws.  Forcing people to buy insurance is the law.  The income tax is law.

Then sometimes we citizens make laws by petition and referendum in the states only to have them overturned by unelected judges in the federal courts.  The courts’ decisions then become law.

The problem the rulers face is always the same.  What happens when everyone is an outlaw?