Jump the fence
or the utility of the 'rules based society'
Hi folks, it’s another beautiful day and I’m headed out of my stable. The sun is up and my pasture looks perfectly emerald green, so I decide to have breakfast and take a couple of nibbles from my front yard. I’d love to jump the fence and eat these long grasses at the neighbor’s. But I don’t, because I know that the only thing I really can’t do around here is to cross the fence. Or is it?
(No the other thing I can’t do is wait to subscribe!)
I’ve recently been told that I can’t whinny after 6PM, because one lady at the other end of the province has developed severe tinnitus that gets worse when she hears whinnies. I’ve also been told that I can’t gallop between 7 and 8 AM, because autistic trans children are upset by sudden motion and their school bus needs to be an affirmative safe space. But then I hope they don’t bring Europe’s latest shenanigans here. The European Commission just ruled that horses can only eat grass and that grass is defined as Poaceae whose stem curves exactly fifteen degrees from top to bottom and who absorb light between 495 and 970 nm. Apparently, they have created that directive to provide a safe space for golf course grasses, who were offended that yellow grasses are referred to by the same name. Yale research had concluded that to refer to yellow grasses by the same word would cause the green grasses to have irreparable psychological harm.
It seems hard for my horse brain to keep track of all of these rules, but I trust humans do. Or do they?
The average person in the United States was estimated to unknowingly brake at least three federal criminal laws on a daily basis [1] in an estimate established over a decade ago. The body of law has not shrunk since then. On the contrary, every year a new volume of federal Statutes at Large appears, which, correcting for amendments and repeals, adds a few thousand pages of law. Then of course there are local and state statutes. Moreover, many federal agencies issue regulations that have the power of law. And then there are millions of pages of case law to complement the other texts.
The United States presents a great example, but other Western countries have produced very similar results. In Britain, since Tony Blair took office, a new law was passed every three hours [2], which amounted to an increase of fifty percent over the preceding decade. The statutes stipulated also expanded to being hundreds of pages long, a trend that has since continued. I won’t even pause for long on the European Commission’s endless list of directives and ordinances. We could go on by listing countries that have adopted similar practices, but let us pause to raise some more fundamental questions.
Has any of the citizens in any of these countries actually read the law? The answer is a very short ‘no’: there is simply too much to read. Even if an individual had read all of these texts, it would be impossible to account for all of it in every action. Having established that citizens can by no means be capable of knowing the full extent of the law, let us remark that law enforcement officers are no different. And even if they knew every single line of law, rules and regulations, they would not have the horsepower to enforce all of it. Great pun, right?
The observation that citizens can impossibly be aware of all rules that they are supposed to abide by and that the enforcement arm neither has the knowledge nor the resources to enforce it in its entirety, leads to a very obvious conclusion. Be it by design or having resulted from organic growth, the present body of law, rules and regulations can only be enforced selectively. In other words, we are always at the mercy of whoever patrols or investigates. Fortunately, most of the time the latter will use their best judgment to pick which rules to enforce. But then the end result is very similar to what existed in the early days of the United States, where a very limited body of law was adjudicated on a case-by-case basis. Wild West or ‘rules based society’, in both cases we seem to end up being dependent upon what certain individuals decide to enforce.
It may be a good time to start pausing the creation of new legislation and trim the existing body down drastically. We don’t need to further expand the ‘rules based society’, since nobody can memorize the rules anyway. What we need is a reason based society.
I’d rather just have a fence not to jump than millions of rules. I won’t even bother with reading the EU’s definition of grass. My intuition tells me what I can eat and I will just nibble on whatever goodness nature presents. If only humans could have some pony common sense!
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(And spread the word!)
References
[1] H.A. Silvergate and A.M. Dershowitz. Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, 2011.
[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-459698/The-Blair-years-new-law-passed-hours.html