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Tuesday, 25 May 2010 08:15 |
"Not only does the action of Governments not deter men from crimes; on the contrary, it increases crime by always disturbing and lowering the moral standard of society. Nor can this be otherwise, since always and everywhere a Government, by its very nature, must put in the place of the highest, eternal, religious law (not written in books but in the hearts of men, and binding on every one) its own unjust, man-made laws, the object of which is neither justice nor the common good of all but various considerations of home and foreign expediency." - Leo Tolstoy, The Meaning of the Russian Revolution
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Comments
And I suppose it's true that, in some cases, the legal system protects antagonizers from in-your-face justice and separates perpetrator from victim so that the former doesn't have to confront the latter in non-violent crimes.
And maybe that's not a good thing now that economics has become a means of warfare.
But, ordinary people aren't all that good at solving crimes... so I side with the people that want to keep our current system.
Welcome back :)
True, in a naive interpretation, governments create crimminals when they enact laws.
Tolstoy is really arguing from a pacifist, Christian, Anarchist position that governments are inherently evil because the supplant the perfect natural, Divine Law with imperfect human laws.
In an ideal world, people should not need to be solving crimes, since there would be no crimes or injustice.
The pacifist went so far as to say that fighting Hitler in WWII was not justified because, if the mostly Christian German soldiers had acted as Christians (and refused to fight), there would have been no German army to fight. But he repeatedly avoided the question of whether or not that means we should just let violent people have their way. He said that Christians should simply not take jobs that require them to potentially be violent.
With human nature being what it is, if the anarchists say that without government there would be less or no crime then they assume something else will act to keep those unegalitarian instincts in check. Social pressure? Threat of violence? I can see an argument for less white collar crime if the police weren't there to protect those who rip people off from the people who were ripped off (by putting an intermediary in the middle -- if your head on a stick was the consequence, rather than a drawn out litigious process that you may end up winning or suffering minimal jail time for, maybe there would be less white collar crime)......but more likely, they would amass private armies and use goodies and economics to make people side with them.
I guess I don't believe in the "ideal world"...but I can see how governments can make things worse or better depending on how they act.
When people talk about natural laws in the context of human society, they often omit death or suggest that we continue to try and avoid it, yet death is very much a part of nature.... maybe one of the most important parts.
Anarchist... pure free markets... what's the difference? Nowadays, you're likely to hear from an anarchist that we need better government healthcare. The meaning seems to have been lost :)