From: Pacedebate-AT-aol.com
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 22:22:38 EDT
Subject: law and order




> Russ wrote:
>  "Then along comes a man with a nail in a board.  He takes over the world
>  with
>  that nail. Then along comes a man with a bigger board and a bigger nail
>  until
>  we have chaos. UHOH!"

"The public's identification of order with law makes it impossible for the
public to ask for one without asking for the other. There is clearly a public
demand for an orderly society. One of human beings' most fundamental desires 
is 
for a peaceful existence secure from violence. But because the public has been
conditioned to express its desire for order as one for law, all calls for a 
more
orderly society are interpreted as calls for more law. And since under our
current political system, all law is supplied by the state, all such calls are
interpreted as calls for a more active and powerful state. The identification 
of
order with law eliminates from public consciousness the very concept of the
decentralized provision of order. With regard to legal services, it renders
the classical liberal idea of a market-generated, spontaneous order
incomprehensible.
I began this Article with a reference to Orwell's concept of doublethink.
But I am now describing the most effective contemporary example we have of
Orwellian "newspeak," the process by which words are redefined to render 
certain
thoughts unthinkable. Were the distinction between order and law
well-understood, the question of whether a state monopoly of law is the best 
way
to ensure an orderly society could be intelligently discussed. But this is
precisely the question that the state does not wish to see raised. By 
collapsing
the concept of order into that of law, the state can ensure that it is not, 
for 
it will have effectively eliminated the idea of a non-state generated order 
from
the public mind."

John Hasnas 1995, Assistant Prof. of Business Ethics at Georgetown and Senior 
Research Fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Wisconsin Law Review, p. 
226

Thanks for reading,

Tim