“F de Koning” became a controversial piece of illegal graffiti on the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The controversy arose not only due to the vandalism of a historic and public property but also because it is an offense to intentionally insult the king, the royal family, or the monarchy, violating the lèse-majesté laws, which are addressed under Article 111 of the Dutch Penal Code.
While the lèse-majesté law is now less frequently used and considered outdated due to the importance of freedom of speech, it still remains part of the law, meaning it can still be applied if the judge deems it appropriate.
This situation brings to mind a joke by Ron Swanson, a fictional character in the sitcom Parks and Recreation, who said: “I have a joke for you. The government is excellent and uses your tax dollars efficiently.” This is indeed funny because it is obviously not true. We are all aware of a lot of inefficiencies in terms of governments leading their operations, such as the above-mentioned lèse-majesté law.
Naturally, we can’t expect a huge operation like a government to be 100% efficient, but at the same time, we can demand that it get progressively better. After all, one of the biggest reasons why many people don’t give money to charities is because they are afraid that their money would be inefficiently spent by these charities, such as being given in high amounts to their CEOs, while we are collectively paying trillions of dollars every year to our respective governments.
This is exactly the reason why in the USA there was a proposal to create a new department whose task would be to thoroughly review existing laws. The aim of this project was to identify suboptimal and outdated laws, thereby making the legal system more efficient.
This new legal department would have the mandate to review the law from top to bottom. Every piece of legislation and clause would be periodically reviewed, with a timestamp placed for when the next review would take place. The important, efficient, and relevant laws would be reviewed less often compared to other laws, with all being judged by their benefit to the common good. Notes could be created to justify why certain actions are as they are. Additionally, on a regular basis, experts in various fields who apply and are affected by any given law would be consulted to identify potential “gray areas” where the law is being used inefficiently or where people may be taking advantage of the current legal system. This new department would be created to address such instances, easily justifying its existence by the amount of greater good it would be able to create.
And while there may be many good apples in a basket, there might also be some bad ones that ideally should be addressed. So, while no one really wants to have a supervisor standing over their shoulder questioning and asking to justify every move, realistically speaking, businesses should be reviewing their practices on a regular basis, and governments should do so too.
Naturally, you would expect this to already be the case with the law overall. However, at the same time, we are all aware of instances, such as the above-mentioned lèse-majesté laws, suggesting that this practice doesn’t exist for most governments, or at least to a suggested extent, and certainly not in the USA to this day.
Interestingly, but perhaps not unexpectedly, the above-proposed project quickly became controversial and was promptly shut down before it could see the light of day, speaking to the illness that exists inside our legal system today where politicians, businesses, and otherwise influential parties are highly invested in maintaining the status quo at any cost, even at the cost of happiness for the greatest number.
And yet, while this one initiative wouldn’t create a utopia in itself, one can see how it could move us in the right direction. While most laws wouldn’t need to be reviewed, others could uncover discrepancies and create mechanisms to address them.
For one, this could lead away from a growing law state where the law is no longer understood unless by some of the experts, and even then in their respective fields, replacing it with a state where markets themselves determine what’s right or wrong, and the state only interferes when things start moving in the incorrect way, such as when it stops being beneficial to happiness for the greatest number.
This is consistent with the message in Life After the State, where its author Dominic Frisby suggests that the state is now making things worse, not better, for people as a whole. As such, while we progressively rely on and blame the state for different problems that we face, we are also giving it progressively more and more power over different parts of our lives, while in many instances, removing the state from our lives would lead to a higher overall efficiency.
Again, we need someone to have a more efficient top-down and down-up overview of the law, and how it is being used, aiming at creating a self-sufficient society where the state only intervenes when it has to, rather than all the time. A department above would be an additional step in creating fewer steps, leading to more transparency, and hopefully making this department one day obsolete itself, as we optimize our lives, leaving a few correct controls, and later just having an overall overview of what’s happening.
Do you think my assessment that we need such a department is correct? Would it make everything better?
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