Letters

From the June 1998 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

While generously applauding Steven Landsburg's remarkable book, Fair Play, Nicholas Schulz criticizes Landsburg's call to disobey bad laws. ("Out of the Mouths of Babes," March.) Schulz is particularly worried about Landsburg's proposal to teach children "that all laws are bad" as well as Landsburg's admonition that the attorney general should be someone who "believes that bad laws are bad and should be ignored."

Landsburg's advocacy of solipsistic lawlessness is only apparent. This confusion is caused by our regrettable habit (slipped into by Landsburg) of equating government dictates--especially statutes--with law. But law and statutes are entirely different things. Genuine law grows spontaneously out of the decentralized interactions of countless people.

This "common law" must be discovered in the actual practices of those affected--such as how commercial law grew through the centuries not from governments but from the actual practices of merchants. Government can no more centrally plan the law than it can centrally plan industrial outputs and prices. Attempts at either sort of central planning generate perverse results.

Statutes, in contrast to genuine law, are almost always arbitrary commands imposed upon citizens by the sovereign with threats of violence. That the sovereign is elected by a majority of voting citizens does little to render more law-like that sovereign's statutory commands. Legal central planning, like economic central planning, is no less absurd when practiced by democratic governments than when it is practiced by totalitarian thugs.

Landsburg is correct if he is read--as I think he should be read--to say that statutes are often bad, and that any decent attorney general should refuse to enforce bad statutes. Indeed, because modern legislatures are largely in the business of supplanting spontaneously evolved law with statutes, refusing to enforce bad statutes may well be an exercise in upholding the law.

Donald J. Boudreaux
President
Foundation for Economic Education
Irvington-on-Hudson, NY