Laws, Courts and Bureaucracies

Letter to the National Post.

Father De Souza has pinned the tail squarely on the bureaucratic donkey (Who watches the watchmen, Mar. 16). When bureaucracies, such as police or prosecutors, are strengthened, citizen rights are weakened. Rights laws are zero-sum game. What you give to one must be taken from another. And the Government's new crime bill takes a great deal away from citizens, legally and financially.

I especially enjoyed the phrase "the bureaucracy that wears gowns and carries guns." The rule of law is a nebulous concept ultimately enforced at the point of a gun. It's legalized violence.

Toronto police are the highest paid in Canada, if not the world, yet its members slip from one blunder to blunder. Witness some of their behaviour during the G20 -- mischief that is slowly becoming class-action lawsuits for which citizens will pay.

Witness the shortage of judges and courts (a situation exacerbated by the new crime bill) which ensures the justice will be delayed and therefore denied. Such delays have already set miscreants free to inflict more mayhem on the public.

We do not obey the law because it is the law. Laws change every day. No one I know reads the Criminal Code to see what they can do that day. Law-abiding? No. To the extent law reflects human behaviour, to that extent it is citizen-abiding.

Aristotle put it this way -- a person capable of only following rules is a natural slave. Is the Government turning us into slaves?