A Second Hand Conjecture

Radley nails this:

So I guess once you’re elected to Congress, you’re immune from drunk driving laws; you can stash the evidence that you’ve committed a crime in your office, because investigators aren’t allowed to search it; if you kill someone because you’ve got a lead foot and blew a stop sign, the taxpayers will cover your financial liability; and, we learn today, you can commit whatever Internet-related crimes you please, because the police aren’t allowed to search your computer.

Meanwhile, the same Congress that has immunized itself from much of the law is also responsible for the ever-expanding federal criminal code, which we can thank for our shamefully enormous and still-soaring prison population, which is by far and away the largest in the world.

You have lawmakers who feel they’re above the law. And who at the same time are criminalizing anything and everything they find tacky, repugnant, or immoral.

Forgive the lofty language, but you know what? This isn’t healthy for our republic.

If you didn’t get it, he thinks the first problem helps lead to the second. I concur and it is true at the state and local level as well. Thus we have problems such as these. Glenn Reynolds asks “what are we going to do about it?” On that score I am less than optimistic. As long as voters believe that growing the power of the state is justified we cannot reduce these men and womens power, and they will not meaningfully reduce their privileges.

As Matthew Yglesias has acknowledged, liberals firmly believe in expanding the power of the state for moral reasons, as do conservatives. That those moral ends lead to different policies does not change that they do see the state as the shaper of the particular (as opposed to general moral ends such as freedom or autonomy) moral outcomes they desire. To change that means changing that view. Few people are willing to do that, or reasonably restrict that impulse, even if they could do so in a bargain that others wouldn’t impose competing moral agendas. So liberals are unwilling to accept non violent sexual or racial discrimination even if it leads to a world where conservatives cannot pass laws forbidding certain sexual practices. Not to mention that in large areas they generally agree, such as on drug policy, whether illicit or for legal medications. If the larger entity of government does not satisfy most voters, it is not because of its size or reach, but the purposes that size and reach is put to which alienates them. Sadly, they will not sacrifice the reach they want to restrict the reach they don’t. Yglesias and Jonah Goldberg, reasonable and sharp liberals and conservatives, state that quite clearly in an exchange with Brink Lindsey at Cato Unbound. I think their point is sound. With such competing and often incoherent demands for the state we have little reason for great optimism.

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