Problem:
We are led to believe that one should always obey laws to be moral and ethical. Anyone who disobeys is a criminal or a terrorist or a person who needs to be quarantined. Here we will attempt to elaborate what we mean when we say that more laws make people irresponsible.
Cases:
Family court laws:
Much of western culture, now infiltrating other cultures, has divorce laws with community asset division, alimony and child custody biased towards women. Given these laws there is a huge uprise in divorce cases in excess of 60% and of these, 80% are initiated by women. Needless to say these laws are taken advantage of by women. This behavior is very natural as all species live by taking advantage of opportunities in the environment. Likewise, women have become more hypergamous, irresponsible and increasingly dependent on the state to advance their goals.
In nature, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Likewise in the human sphere, men have started to take somewhat opposite roles to the previous male culture, entirely without design, to create a sort of social balance. Increasingly men have started to avoid marriage and have started thinking very practically about relationships with women in order to avoid huge penalties from the state for loving unwisely. A majority of the tax base comes from men, and the state could be said to tax single men for not being married. One eastern country which is far ahead of western culture in this regard is Japan, where 75% of men aged 25 to 35 are completely avoiding marriage because of family court laws. There is in fact a special term, Herbivorous Men, coined for such behavior. A synonymous acronym popular among western men is MGTOW, for Men Going Their Own Way.
There is a large increase in false dowry cases in India. Indian women, for varied reasons (control of property, multi partner relationships, physical or mental problems of their own) have increasingly filed false cases to take advantage of laws to have quick access to wealth without putting any real effort, commitment or emotional investment into the relationship. The majority of these cases do not even go to trial however, with the end of sharing the man's resources with the woman. Lawyers delay the process and so do the courts.
In essence: Women have become increasingly irresponsible because of family court laws.
Rape / Domestic Violence / Pedophilia laws:
These laws are the sibling laws of the family laws with a criminal side. While these laws no doubt were created with the best of intentions, the unintended result is that there is huge abuse by women and lawyers to charge men (almost exclusively) criminally. Right now it is very hard for a wealthy person or a celebrity to avoid any such allegations. The likely degree of punishment for a man vs. a woman is drastically different, and women know that it is easy to get away with such crimes.
Caste System/Minority laws:
This case is very specific to India where a person born into a certain social hierarchy is taken advantage of by default, by people in higher castes. To compensate for such historic discrimination the state has made provision that a certain percentage of jobs in public institutions be given to these lower hierarchy groups and also on the basis of gender bias. Because of these laws many such jobs are given to unqualified people, and the performance of the agencies giving these jobs has decreased dramatically.
Not just jobs, but whenever there are disagreements among various castes touching on property or politics etc., legal cases are filed stating that upper caste people were abusing lower caste people. Because a huge uproar can be created in the media by these lower caste groups, this can lead to vandalism and violence. Because of the law, members of the lower caste group, previously subordinate, have become irresponsible exploiters of a law meant to protect them.
Similarly in western states, welfare state laws or rules are passed for minorities and special interest groups which in turned are abused by these people.
Patent / Corporate Laws:
Industries in every sphere; pharmaceutical, insurance, healthcare, etc. lobby to make laws designed to keep actual participation in success restricted to a small group which is ever growing richer.
The same may be said of patent laws. These laws, once meant to provide a guaranteed period of time to the inventor of a device or process to attempt to capitalize on their work, now are geared for the corporations to profit forever, while the employees who may have worked to provide the entirety of the concept and innovation for the patents are not supposed to use their own invention, with the rationale that the organization provided the environment for such an invention to arise. Since enterprise reaps the reward and a large percentage of shares are owned by few people, firms have a motivation to behave to their own benefit.
Consequently more and more people are avoiding work altogether instead of making a few people rich. By having no such laws common people will benefit alot by copying each others innovation and providing better value to customers.
Tax quasi laws:
Almost all governments across the world collect tremendous amount of taxes on citizens in the name of security, health, safety, education, etc. However, if you analyze the system, most of these funds go to unproductive people and people who are in control of the decision making. And to a large extent there is no accounting of the amount of money taken from taxes and invested for the public benefit. The wealth of the productive people are funnelled to unproductive sectors.
For example in India politicians give away subsidies like free electricity to farmers, free live stock to a certain caste, no taxes on certain sectors, etc. while taxing the productive population. This has severe consequences on growth of population and irresponsibility of subsidized sections. Lot of productive Indians just escape to other countries and giving up the tax laws of India, hence no real organic growth in the economy.
Due to severe tax implications people and companies have started to store their wealth outside of the country. Because of this entirely rational behavior they are labeled criminal and irresponsible or otherwise shamed.
Cause:
If one ponders beyond the anecdotal cases there are two common patterns whereby these laws make people irresponsible.
One, where the enforcing authority is a centralized system. As with any centralized system even though it starts with a goal beneficial to that society, it will soon become a growing, self perpetuating entity which leads to unethical enterprise which ends up serving itself and its people with power. In the modern world we have police literally generating criminals for increasingly trivial new crimes, and a legal system which feeds these unfortunates to the modern slave masters who run private corporate prisons. As a result people with such authority become irresponsible and the entire system comes into question.
Second, instead of narrowing the scope of the problem, we tend to try to roll out global one-size-fits-all solutions or campaigns which do not consider the wide variety of belief systems or perceptions of Earth’s people, basically forcing people to act opposite to their own natural self interest.
Certain laws, even though made to justify subduing certain minority abnormal behaviour like rape, murder, harrassment, etc. have made the majority side claim to be victims, which benefits lawyers and courts as they produce income. Thus justice system pass laws so that more people gets implicated into legal system. As more people gets irresponsible, legal system assumes itself as moral superiority and behaves without any rationality and thus becoming self beneficial system.
Solution:
Minimise as many as centralised authority-based laws and have decentralised based rules. What it means to the current world is do not have much of tax laws, harassment laws, welfare laws, marriage laws, medicare/medical laws etc at the state level. Take away the authority from state and legal system and move it to people as much as possible. Of course this by no means to say that we do not have to get rid of common laws like murder, Corporate Fraud, etc which we need legal system to solve however, most of the society laws should not be taken by the legal system and the power should remain among people.
Decentralized rules can be very localized affecting and changing according to people within communities, these are much more responsive to people needs. Every person in such a community is an enforcing authority which in turn makes people responsible. Everyone has a stake in such a system. A person who is not ok with the set of rules in one community can migrate to another communities formed by like minded individuals which suits their needs.
Because of the reduction of laws, now the onus on the people to behave naturally which reduces the state involvment. Initially a large number of societies with different rules might arise, however these societies can eventually converge to rational number based on the normal range of human wants and needs, with better rules and prosperity than the human criminalization model we now have where everyone is viewed as criminal with a slightest behavior deviation imposed by the state.
Another way to think is Laws should be discouraging for the people to approach it so that they can solve their own problems.
Cases:
Technology:
Technology provides a great analogy in understanding decentralized and narrowing the scope of a problem. An engineer while developing a piece of software always tries to reduce the scope of variables to as few as possible in order to avoid security, space and performance issues. As things are localized every module is easy to maintain and so govern.
Open source software like Linux, digital crypto currencies are getting widely adopted rapidly because everyone who engages in such paradigms have mutual benefit and hence they become responsible to maintain such a system. These are decentralized systems and failure in part of the system does not crash the whole system. Any better ideas are exchanged with everyones agreement for the betterment of the community. A group of people who are not happy with these sets of rules can form their own rules and in turn their own communities. Internet is example number one.
Virtues:
Virtues like courage, goodness, valor, etc. among humans evolved without any central authority enforcing them as laws. It was illegal to steal, but it wasn’t a crime to be untrustworthy or unhelpful. And yet these virtues are regarded highly among humans without any laws. According to Aristotle these virtues are the mean of two extremes. For example courage is a midway between cowardice and rashness. Similarly this principle can be extended to other virtues. Such a mean is achieved not because one fine day, or in a short time, humans have realized that is the best option. However, this constantly swings from one extreme to another like a pendulum. Each time, in every moment, action from the extremes to the mean is tested by individuals and finally settles to a mean. Even in a case where there were no central laws or authority to enforce them, individuals striving among themselves achieve values making them responsible members of a society.
Foot Note:
The only laws that are universal are laws of nature and mathematics and we do not need any governing bodies to implement them, or people in uniform to enforce them. Any system which keeps societal rules close to such natural principles will flourish.
References:
Famous Quotes:
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws. --- Plato 423 BC — 348 BC