The Fall of the Rule of Law

Any reasonable person should see the parallels between this and our current situation with federal regulatory agencies, the ATF, and national, state, and local efforts in the drug war.

The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) is consulting members on whether to seek the authority to punish people without going to court. It has heard plans from one police chief for powers to ban teenagers from city centres and gangs from meeting up. Civil rights group Liberty said that the suggestion was "a recipe for arbitrary justice". "When you do decide that someone's been so criminal and behaved so badly and harmed other people that you need to punish them, that really is something that in a democracy belongs with the courts," director Shami Chakrabati told BBC News.

The reason we have a State is to provide a predictable, reliable system for the administration of justice as opposed to the lynch mob. The reason we separate the three functions of the State (the creation of law, the enforcement of law, and clearing things up when the law is in question) is so that the executive power - the power most feared by the Founders and the only power present in authoritarian states - cannot just do whatever it pleases, using its force to enhance and protect its own power and the privilege of those who make up the state. A court is involved in virtually every aspect of enforcing the law (the provision of warrants for search and arrest, arraignment, indictment, determination of guilt, sentencing) is to ensure that the executive is justified - is within the law and operating in a prescribed manner - in its actions. The problem with extra-judicial "street trial" is that its effects are precisely the opposite of those listed by Shami Chakrabati, that "you can alienate people from the police and make the police's job even harder if they are perceived to be dishing out summary justice on the street." A police force that can dispense punishment without a court is a police force that imposes the will of each particular officer on citizens, where the lack of official court procedures makes appeal far less likely of success.

An officer's own personal interpretation of the law may be far more broad than a court's, and his justice far more draconian. The people wouldn't be alienated from the people at all. On the contrary, they would know them all too well: given the current top-down statist view of government in Britain (providing a blueprint of and an insight into the increasing tendency to view government in such a manner here in the US)in which directives are made and enforced with decreasing popular, procedural, or legislative say so, the administrative under this proposal may soon be the dominant feature in the relationship between Britons and their ever-awkward, cumbersome government. Which of course is something that has been occurring here in the states since the New Deal. A multitude of federal regulatory agencies with power over vast swaths of formerly private American life act as virtual, field specific shadow governments. They make regulations independent of Congress, they are not bound by traditional notions such as "search warrants", they determine guilt outside of federal criminal or civil courts, and they impose and enforce punishments virtually by themselves.

The FCC, OSHA, and EPA are just three of the most well known. Hardly anyone bats an eye when OSHA inspectors enter private property unannounced and, without a search warrant, proceed to inspect for violations of arcane and usually ridiculous regulations. There is not an outcry when the wiz-kids at the EPA create some regulation that reflects little of the reality of the ground and has never even been approached with a cost/benefit analysis. No one seems to notice that, per the FIRST clause of the very FIRST article of the Constitution, new restrictions on citizens have to be passed into law by Congress and not in a government agency's board room independent of insight by people who have been elected by citizens. The fact that appeals of regulatory agency regulations are handled by "review boards" made up of technocrat and ideologue agency employees and not by that silly, unfamiliar thing we like to call the judicial branch. The abrogation of the rule of law follows closely with the destruction of separation of powers, which is itself an epiphenomena of legicide - the legislature giving up powers via broad discretionary authority to de jure (the President) or de facto (the EPA) executive officers or bodies. That legicide mostly occurs when a legislative body takes upon itself the task of directing society - of interfering in the market via command, regulation, or redistribution - and can no longer take the time to draft (much less read) all that is required of such a task or take time out of its schedule of "doing something" or "fixing problems" to affect proper oversight of its own functions and those of the other branches.

Civilizations frequently predict their own destruction, and the innumerable voices of secular or cultural apocalypse have led men to brash and unwise extremes. Yet civilizations, in the midst of actual destruction, are not fain to contemplate the real reasons behind it for the men that make up such civilizations find some of themselves in the blame either in action or acquiescence. This is why those who know the past are best prepared for the progeny of time we call the future. The history of the West from Greece to now has shown us what happens when men worship their own ideas, abandoning reality and tradition for wishful thinking and societal experimentation. The social engineer, the man who states that he and he alone has the answers to whatever problems we seek solved, the man who believes that the re-arrangement of society - stripping men from that to which they are comfortable and that to which they aspire - is necessary for progress and that only through coercion will men be molded into modernity, is a man who will sabotage the foundations of any free civilization. As long as we have a little bit of that social engineer, that magician who claims for himself God's role in transcending human nature, in each of us, our civilization's fall beneath the waves will not stop.