Common law evolved via market forces. If a judge made a wise ruling, it was cited as precedent and used in other cases. If a judge made a stupid ruling, it was ignored. Over time, certain common rulings were treated as laws.
Common law is flexible, because the judge can always use his personal discretion. If the judge is fair and doesn't have an unaccountable monopoly, then common law works. Another name for common law is "natural law".
I don't consider common law and natural law to be exactly the same. As practiced in the past, common law recognizes the legitimacy of monopolistic guilds. According to common law, it's perfectly acceptable for doctors to form a guild and use State violence to prevent non-guild members from working as a doctor. This is obviously a violation of natural law.
State law evolves differently. A handful of people make up arbitrary rules and use violence to impose them on everyone else. During prohibition, the decision to ban alcohol was the arbitrary decision of a handful of people. As another example, consider the ban on possession of marijuana. The ban on incandescent light bulbs is another arbitrary decision by an illegitimate government.
The worst example of corrupt State law is the Federal Reserve and income tax. It is impractical/illegal for people to use sound money. Income taxes mean that people must directly turn over a high percentage of their labor to the State.
When a handful of people can violently impose their will on everyone else, there is a huge reward for dishonesty. It's very easy to for politicians and their backers to line their pockets at the expense of everyone else.
With corrupt State law, the law primarily benefit politicians and their backers instead of the average person.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Common/Natural Law vs. Corrupt State Law
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I read your other post about incandescent light bulbs. I don't think I knew about your blog yet back in December when that was written.
I am just as furious about the light bulbs as you are. I personally have experienced certain eye problems from fluorescent bulbs. I tried using one of those bright lights for seasonal depression, and it made my vision blurry for a long time afterwards. I usually had been setting the light to the right of me, and so the right eye got hit worse than the left eye. My right eye is permanently a little bit blurrier now. (I'm lucky, it's not too bad, because I was smart enough to stop using the light.)
Anyway that's when I started researching what fluorescent bulbs can do to your eyes.
I've read that other people have problems with those compact fluorescent bulbs. If you have any brain disorders that involve movement and balance, the imperceptible flickering of the light will screw up your ability to walk and stand up. And they DO make it difficult to concentrate on reading.
I thought about stocking up on incandescents just like you did! I wondered about 'making light bulbs in the basement' and that kind of thing too.
Some people on the net have joked about going back to using candles. If I have to, I might do that for real. After a few hundred houses burn down, the government might figure out that banning incandescents, and forcing people to go back to candles, is a bad idea.
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