How many times have you heard someone say that? They say it without thinking, without realizing the force they advocate and without knowing about natural law.

Laws convey the myth of controlled change when all the law does is crush change. Some great new future will come as a result of this law or that law. Yet we slide from disaster to disaster, from war to war. Politicians take to the pulpit with fire and brimstone to talk about how bad the current situation is, how some great tragedy has taken place and must be avoided in the future -- and how the law they propose will do that. Ignoring that previous law created the disaster they now address. Could a law like the Patriot Act ever prevent a 9-11?

The law is intended to control the future. Law is begat by politics and driven by the dynamics of force. World history clearly shows that the political context has not changed in thousands of years. With the great shining exception of the United States all states were founded upon a simple premise -- coercion.Aggregated force in the form of the state used to compel obedience over a geographic area. The rise of the modern-day superpower with the ability to compel obedience over a radius of 6000 miles is merely a difference of degree and not of substance. With the excuse of providing security , playing to that blind bicameral side , each government-state has evolved into an extortion racket locking us into the anticivilization . What would happen if that productive creative ability that is business were free to create the future with life-enhancing products? How far could it take us?

When technology was static, empires grew and lasted a thousand years. An ancient Chinese man born into one ruling dynasty would be easily at home in the China of his distant progeny of another dynasty a thousand years later. But technology is no longer static. It advances by leaps and bounds. It perturbs that static system that is the balance of power between the collective fiction of the state and the individual. Notice how the empires have fallen and the rate. At its peak Pax Romana lasted 200 years. Pax Brittanica lasted 100 years. Pax Americana lasted 50 years. Round and round technology goes placing more and more energy at the disposal of the individual - or the terrorist. The terrorist doesn't think past his moment of glory - that the same perversion of redirecting productive energy to destruction can be used to topple the terrorist-ruler in the future. That all terrorism can accomplish is a downward spiral of destruction into the darkness of nuclear conflict.

Where there is law, regulation cannot be far behind. Regulations convey the myth of the mastered past. Yet they typically carry the full force of the law.Nobody points out that a properly learned lesson requires no regulation to enforce it. No pilot, for example, avoids flying into a thundercloud because of FAA regulations. No doctor gives a drink to a patient about to undergo surgery because of FDA regulations. It is done because it is the right thing to do given the circumstance. But circumstances change because technology and knowledge advance.

Taken together laws and regulations ossify the system. Taken together they squeeze out change. Taken together they prevent you from adapting. The laws and regulations prevent reactions needed to survive, to prosper. Examples abound. Klamath farmers can't get crop irrigation water because of the Endangered Species Act. The same law caused a nine-hour delay in dumping water on trapped firefighters battling a forest blaze- the firefighters died. And what about the blaze itself, caused by forest overgrowth that itself was the result of Forest Service regulations?

And what about all those who become dependent on the system? "But the law is the law!" they scream. They want more law, more instruments of non-compassion and non-productivity. More resources devoted to enforcement of that which requires no enforcement. Does it ever occur to the regulators, that third-party regulation is proper only if those who are regulated would like to pay for it? "The law is the law!" is valid only in the most narrow sense and only in the case of proper universal law. Otherwise it deteriorates to a draconian instrument of enforcement by neocheating elites. It becomes a massive instrument of non-compassion destroying lives everywhere.

What if we were free of the current multi-trillion regulatory burden? What would our quality of life be?

Think twice before saying: There ought to be a law! You might live longer and better.

Many thanks to Dr. FRW, MH, RM, GT for the inspiration of this piece and the demystified ideas of Frank Herbert and Carroll Quigley.

Roberto Da Roma