When Everything is a Crime: Harvey Silverglate on the Overregulation of Ordinary Life

When Everything is a Crime: Harvey Silverglate on the Overregulation of Ordinary Life

Libertarian Reason TV interviews this very interesting man on how there are too many laws and too many regulations and the dangers of vaguely written statute law.

Libertarians, love 'em or hate 'em, are frequently the people asking the important questions about government and the peoples relationship to it.

 

It's really hard to understand this without reading through the details of countless real life examples of people who have been prosecuted. Basically they didn't do anything that you would think of as being illegal. It all comes down to a prosecutor stretching the interpretation of the law, to make it mean something it wasn't meant to mean, or something no one anticipated. Then the prosecutors are really good at making the defendant look like a bad person, and it's surprisingly not that difficult to win a jury conviction simply by the prosecution painting a very distorted version of the truth. Again, it can be hard to understand how this works without reading the details in real life cases that have happened. Very often though the defendant will simply be coerced into pleading guilty by the threat of very serious charges.

The problem is that over the years (especially the last 50 years) countless very broadly worded laws have continued to be passed, and these laws build up, so a prosecutor has a wide selection of different laws they can choose from, in any particular case. Basically all these criminal laws give them more ammunition they can use. And that was sort of the point of many of these laws, to give prosecutors more ammunition so it would be easier to go after criminals. Except when those open-ended laws get turned around and used on people who are not really criminals.

Then the prosecutor faces little risk of being held responsible because they have plausible deniability. They can claim they were just applying the law, and now it comes down to a questionable interpretation of the law.

 

Libertarians tend to be just right wingers looking for exotic title. I've seen more law and order questioning from libertines (and they're just as likely to pain their houses black just for the crack)

 

Even (Conservative Christian) Pat Robertson thinks there's a problem.

Video here:
http://www1.cbn.com/video/overcriminalization-making-us-a-nation-of-felons

 

IMO the libertarians are the ONLY people asking intelligent question and making intelligent comments on the pathetic state of government we have in this country.

Yes, we are horribly over-regulated. Constitutional governance does not exist in this country, and only the libertarians talk about that fact.

 

Which libertarians? I have some respect for the anarchist variation. They've at least bothered with economics. The yank version tends to just say "its the constitution" a lot and make very poor reference to the Austrian school when cornered.

 

You do have point about the Constitution mantra. However, anarchy is not a viable option, imo...

 

I'd probably agree, but I do think the anarchists have a lot to say (e.g. they construct pertinent, and logical point, over how globalisation has evolved and how it negatively impacts on the working classes). Its just a shame that the Libertarian tag has been corrupted: from right wing think tanks (who are ironically financed by big business) to reliance on 'political games' (rather than genuine application of sound economic concepts).

 

Economics and the Constitution are 2 different things. The Libs talk about both, and that's OK by me. As I understand them, anarchy is not a goal.