Due to this, Libertarians can find endless areas to criticize the government, and therefore assume that the government is essentially bad and laws are essentially harmful. But this isn't true. They are just looking at it from a distorted, contemporary view. In the early 1900's, the government basically had no laws. At the time, a few rich people controlled most of the country's wealth. There were no laws requiring companies compensate workers hurt on the job, and therefore no incentive for employers to protect their workers from harm. There were no national parks and no animal cruelty laws. Child labor was fine -- there was no mandate to educate your children, and illiteracy was still common. There were no curbs to immigration, so millions of people who couldn't speak English were wandering around the cities. This of course meant extremely low wages for workers, since there was no minimum wage either. There were no laws for sanitation, doctors were more likely to kill their patients than help them. Men in cities tended to live in boarding houses, twenty people to a room we now provide for one, and even that number would be tripled by renting the cots out in 3 8 hour shifts. Work hours could extend indefinitely, there were no restrictions to how long a worker's day or week went, and no overtime benefits. There were no laws against pollution. Coal miners, railroad workers, and the like had a higher death rate than the soldiers at Waterloo. "The Jungle" was written to show the ridiculously harsh life an immigrant family had in America, but its only side effect was for people to realize how utterly unsanitary our slaughterhouses were. Everything was unsanitary. There were no requirements for businesses to be sanitary, no health inspections, no fire inspections, nothing. Banks could issue their own money, without needing any ratio of reserves to loans, without any attempt to curb insider trading, pyramid schemes, or other financial frauds. People deposited money into banks at their own risk, since there was no restitution if the bank holding your money went bankrupt. Cocaine was sold as a normal ingredient in soda! Opium was prescribed for virtually every illness. Drinking and smoking were also constants, and there were no laws against any of it.
Far from being a libertarian paradise, 1900 was a year completely unacceptable to the people actually living in it. As quickly as the people could, they elected officials who promised to curb the power of the private sphere and introduce new laws that would help the wider public. There already existed laws against theft, murder, and rape, and yet the country realized that society had become predatory and inimical to the vast majority of people living within it. You could say that the moment the country shifted from an agrarian to an industrial economy, a whole new set of laws was necessary to construct a decent life for the average man. The end result of all these new laws were the 1950's. A country that was clean, healthy, wealthy, virtuous, prosperous, united, educated, and basically perfect in every way. Immigration had been stopped, a minimum wage put in place, scholarships granted to anyone who wanted to go to college, child labor banned, working hours curtailed to reasonable limits, stipends granted to the old, widows, and the disabled. National parks had been formed, giant monopolies broken up, the middle class lived almost as well as the rich, drugs were banned, hospitals become scientific places with real medicine and cures, you name it. A flurry of laws had been passed, an income tax had been passed, all sorts of regulations were passed, and everyone's lives were infinitely improved from the start of the century. No one living in 1950, when asked, would have said that they would prefer the law codes of 1900, or the life of that era said law codes created.
Now in 2010, people are wondering why their lives are so much worse than the America of 1950, and polls show many, or most of us, think the next generation will be less well off than the current generation. Libertarians will say it is because of all the laws we passed since 1900, Conservatives will say it is because all the laws we passed since 1965, but progressives have the real answer. It isn't because we passed too many laws, it's because we passed too few.
You see, every time technology changes, civilization must also change. When a country goes from a stable, working set of laws for its current lifestyle, but goes on to change entirely its lifestyle, without changing any of its laws, friction is bound to occur. The industrial revolution made life worse, not better, for the majority of the people living in it. But with time people discovered and passed the proper sets of laws that could make people live better lives than before the industrial revolution. It is a lot like when a gaming company comes out with a new hardware console. For a while, software developers are so far behind that games released to the Super Nintendo play better and look better than games released to the Playstation. But as the years go by, software developers learn the new eccentricities of the device they are programming for, and find ways to maximize its capabilities and limit its drawbacks. By the end of a gaming console's generations, the games look completely different from what came out at the beginning -- even though nothing about the hardware had changed.
1900 was an era of 20th century hardware and 18th century software. When technology changes and circumstances change, laws must also change until people can live a decent life again. The longer the lag between technological change and changes in the law to create a new suitable civilization, the worse living conditions will grow. It's a lot like evolution. In stable environments, species can remain virtually unchanged for millions of years. There is no reason to change. They've found the optimum way of dealing with the environment, and thus become as stable as the world they live in. But in unstable environments, like after the meteor struck in 65 million BC, evolution creates drastic and numerous changes until a whole new host of species never seen before was inhabiting the Earth. Law codes that work just fine for an agrarian economy for hundreds of years must go extinct after the meteor of the spinning machine hits the Earth, and whole new law codes never seen before must emerge in their place. Trying to adapt an old set of laws to new eventualities always fails, because the change is too drastic and fundamental for old ways of thinking to succeed. Dinosaurs didn't adapt, they just died. Mammals, an entirely different type of life, adapted instead.
We live in an age of constant technological revolution and upheaval. Our economy has changed, fundamentally, from what it was in the 1950's. For one thing, machines do most of the labor. For another, most money is made in the 'service' sector. For another, 2/3 of the GDP relies on consumption. For another, women have higher employment rates than men. For another, America's population has doubled. For another, we have gone from 90% white to 65% white. For another, computers were invented. For another, the internet was invented. For another, the birth control pill was invented. So on and so forth. Not only have there been incredible changes within just one human lifetime, but the pace of change continues to accelerate. Computers improve, genetic engineering improves, stem cells improve, robotics improve, medicine improves, demographics change, morals change, religions change -- and the law stays the same. As people look around at a decade of disaster, and look ahead only seeing more of the same, we are beginning to see the same fault lines, the same friction, that occurred last time the world underwent revolutionary change but government tried to stay the same. It didn't work for Louis the XVI and it won't work for us.
Take the birth control pill. Previously, there were obviously bad side effects to having casual sex -- women risked getting pregnant. Once that was no longer true, the entire morality of the last 10,000 years had to be thrown out. All religion, all culture, all 'common sense,' all everything that had prevented women from having casual sex with men was gone. The law had simply assumed women wouldn't have casual sex, and therefore had no law against it. Previously there had been no need for the law, because physical reality dictated women not do it anyway. But with the birth control pill creating a new physical reality, any woman who wished could do whatever she wished. Those who whined about cultural or religious reasons why they should stay virtuous were just dismissed as irrational and old fashioned -- it quickly became obvious that 'culture' has no power when it isn't connected to economic realities or the law. There is a drastic need to curtail casual sex which no law previously needed to do in the past -- and yet the law hasn't changed. The law sleepwalked through the entire change, watching as we went from a land of virginity, marriage, and children to a land of sex, divorce, and childlessness. If anyone thinks this is really an improvement and thus the law should be left alone, they should refer to studies like these:
http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/health/2010/jan/Study-Shows-Increase-in-Anxiety--Depression-in-Young-People.html
Corroborating what school counselors have observed nationwide, a new study found that five times as many high school and college students are dealing with mental health issues as students that were surveyed during the Great Depression.
Twenge says that the numbers may actually be low; she believes that students on antidepressants and other medications may have skewed the results, because these drugs help to relieve the symptoms addressed in the study.
We are a profoundly unhappy country. We are the least happy people of all time, and this while being much richer than people of the great depression. The issue of whether free love, divorce, and childlessness was an improvement or degradation in people's lives is a closed question.
The same is true of divorce laws. Divorce was available in the past because everyone knew it was impossible to actually happen. After all, women couldn't support themselves or their children, so how could they possibly desert their husbands? The law sleepwalked again while a profound change occurred in the market, making women more desirable workers than men, and giving women all the independence they needed to have children out of wedlock, or divorce and take the children with them, or simply never marry or have children at all. With machines doing all heavy labor, the presumption that men would always be able to earn their keep with their muscles has become bogus, but the law stays the same -- welfare is only for 'disabled' people or women with children. The law has no answer for the fact that, according to economists, 10% of our workforce is unemployable and will remain unemployable for the next ten years -- and that unemployment has hit men the hardest during this recession.
Even though there are no new jobs, the government has failed to act to pass a law stopping the influx of continued mass migration. America failed to produce a single new job this decade, but we increased our population by 35 million. All of this increase is due to immigrants and the children of immigrants. By adding 35 million people and zero no jobs, we have simply added 35 million people to the welfare rolls -- or if you prefer we could starve 35 million people to death. Either way, surely we can agree that the outcome is bad, and the law refuses to act while conditions change all around it. Why hasn't immigration been stopped until everyone already in America can find a job? Why aren't we screening for skilled laborers who can possibly find a job instead of unskilled laborers who can't?
Previously no one had to worry about dysgenics because everyone was white and thus equally smart. Now stupid people have far more children than smart people in this country, which will result in all sorts of social maladies, but still no law is passed against it. This is because the government refuses to adapt to new circumstances. If eugenics wasn't necessary in 1950, libertarians reason, why is it necessary today?
But I don't want to get bogged down into details. I want to make my point from a theoretical point of view. The theory follows Marx: Each time technology changes create new conditions for human life, the government must also change to suit the new conditions. Laws changed when we shifted from hunter-gathering to farming. they changed again when we shifted from farming to manufacturing. But even though we've shifted multiple times from manufacturing, to service jobs, to a purely illusionary economy built on financial instruments, the law has simply sat there. The goal of government is for everyone living in it to be happy. People have continuously grown unhappier with this do-nothing government that has made no fundamental changes corresponding to the fundamental changes that have occurred in our economy and society. The pace of change is continuing to accelerate and make the situation even worse every decade the government sits idle. Eventually all fault lines under enough stress result in earthquakes, somewhere up or down the line.
Nero fiddled while Rome burned.
America fiddles while the country undergoes revolutionary changes that are making people miserable and destitute by the tens of millions.
Eventually this country will collapse from the tension of an unchanging government in the midst of a changing world, just like Weimar Germany, Louis' France, and Tsarist Russia. Those who refuse to adapt, to evolve, to fit the new living conditions on Earth, are destined for extinction. Libertarianism, the ultimate refusal to pass any laws no matter what the world looks like and no matter how bad things become, is the ultimate evolutionary dead-end.
It has become apparent that the economy is no longer suitable for gainful employment of most living people and is built on illusions and makework, a soap bubble just waiting to pop. A responsive government would give people the citizen's dividend, a guaranteed $1,000 check in the mail per month to everyone equally, so that the soap bubble economy can be popped without jeopardizing the welfare of our people.
It has become apparent that the family structure is destined to die without outside help, and that if the family goes, so goes the mental health of our children and the very existence of children being born at all. The only solution is to mandate marriage at age 20 and 2 children by age 25, while banning adultery or divorce.
It has become apparent that religion, tradition, peer pressure, and economic necessity no longer serves as any check on sinful behavior. As a result, larger and larger pools of people are hurting others, hurting themselves, and are being hurt in emotionally crippling ways that suck the vitality out of a country. Russia has already gone down this path, where life expectancy for men shrunk to 50 years due to alcoholism and other nihilist practices. To avoid becoming a nation of zombies staring out of glazed eyes sitting in ramshackle shacks drinking, snorting, cutting, or fucking our thoughts away, we must pass and seriously enforce laws against vice and the promotion of vice in the media/schools.
It has become apparent that two races, generally speaking, can never live together in peace and harmony and there will always be hatred and resentment between them. Children self-segregate in the schools, adults self-segregate in their neighborhoods, and the problem has remained unsolvable despite 50 years of government intervention. Since integration doesn't work, the only other solution is separation. Whites must be given back the opportunity to live in a peaceful, harmonious, and loving society which harbors no hidden agendas or resentments against any of its members. Which can walk around in any neighborhood anywhere in the country safely. Which is never victimized by a hostile elite unrelated to themselves in seats of tremendous power, like politics, media, the military, the church, or business. Which can guarantee that someone's children and grandchildren will live just as safely as they themselves live today, free of invasion or conquest by racially hostile outsiders.
It has become apparent that the genetic quality of mankind is deteriorating and that, if nothing is done, we might descend back to a level of 'nasty, brutish, and short' lifestyles for the masses, and zero human accomplishment for the elites. At best we will stagger through the centuries at a glacial pace with a dramatically reduced quality of living and lower appreciation for the arts or understanding of the sciences. The solution is a law preventing dysgenic births and encouraging eugenic births, as well as continued research into the links between genes and human behavior, until we unlock the secrets of genetic engineering, and then the massive use thereof.
Without these laws, one way or another, we're doomed.
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