For Law Plain and Simple

We hold it to be a fundamental position, that the people have understanding enough to know their interest, and to take care of it. The legitimate object of all governments and laws, therefore, is, to protect men from the force or fraud of others, and not to protect them against themselves. This the law cannot do; and, wherever it assumes this sort of guardianship over men, it degrades and corrupts them without rendering service. How many laws would be expunged from our code, if the doctrine now advanced were more regarded?

George Hay - Speech Delivered in the Legislature of Virginia in the Session of 1816-17

Three and a half centuries ago a party of pamphleteers appeared in England. These "supporters and defenders of liberty and propriety," known to history as the Levellers, stood against the "grandees" and "arbitrarians" of their day by calling for equality under the law and intelligibility in the law. "Yee know," they wrote in A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (1646), "the Lawes of this Nation are unworthy a Free-People, and deserve from first to last, to be considered, and seriously debated, and reduced to an agreement with common equity, and right reason, which ought to be the Forme and Life of every Government." They dreamt "that all the laws might be reduced to a smaller number to be comprised in one volume in the English tongue, that every free commoner might understand his own proceedings."

Law drowns in its own flood. More than a century later, another bold pamphleteer, Thomas Paine, called for a periodic review of the "whole mass of laws" in order "to bring this misshapen monster into form, and to prevent its lapsing again into a wilderness state." Thomas Jefferson drafted a bill for such a general revision of the laws of Virginia within a few days of his assuming legislative office in 1776, a revision that took two and a half years. Later when President, in 1802, Jefferson targeted the acts of government, writing: "[W]e might hope to see the finances of the Union as clear and intelligible as a merchant's book, so that every member of Congress, and every man of any mind in the Union, should be able to comprehend them, to investigate abuses and consequently control them." Paine advocated sunsetting old laws and acts after a fixed period making ongoing Congressional revision necessary: "If it was made an article in the Constitution, that all laws and acts should cease of themselves in thirty years, and have no legal force beyond that time, it would prevent their becoming too numerous and voluminous, and serve them within view in a compact compass. Such as were proper to be continued, would be enacted again, and those which were not, would go into oblivion."

Let's reunite law and liberty. "A great idea from the beginning has been working in the minds of this people, and it broke forth with peculiar energy in our Revolution," wrote William Ellery Channing. "This is the idea of human rights. In our Revolution liberty was our watchword... Liberty was always regarded as each man's right, imposing on every other man a moral obligation to abstain from doing it violence. Liberty and law were always united in our minds."

The Solonian Journal shall endeavor to further the cause of such a reunion of law and liberty, humbly recognizing that, in the words of Channing, "Legislation has its limits. It is a power to be wielded against a few evils only. It acts by physical force, and all the higher improvements of human beings come from truth and love. Government does little more than place society in a condition which favors the action of higher powers than its own."

An earlier version of this article appeared in The Minnesota Libertarian January 1995. I added the last paragraph in November 1995. I added the first sentence of the second paragraph in September 2007.

Update (Nov 26, 2007): After reading James Buchanan's book on classical liberalism and, more particularly, on the ethics of liberalism, I should like to emphasize how much more effective a revitalization of the "ethics of liberalism" would be than a mere taming of the wilderness of laws, as necessary and daunting as the latter task may be.

Introductory Remarks

Here are a few opening words from William Ellery Channing (1841),

Another important step is, a better comprehension by communities that government is at best a rude machinery which can accomplish but very limited good, and which, when strained to accomplish what individuals should do for themselves, is sure to be perverted by selfishness to narrow purposes, or to defeat through ignorance its own ends. Man is too ignorant to govern much, to form vast plans for states and empires. Human policy has almost always been in conflict with the great laws of social well-being; and the less we rely on it the better. The less of power, given to man over man, the better. I speak, of course, of physical, political force. There is a power which cannot be accumulated to excess,—I mean moral power, that of truth and virtue, the royalty of wisdom and love, of magnanimity and true religion. This is the guardian of all right. It makes those whom it acts on free. It is mightiest when most gentle. In the progress of society this is more and more to supersede the coarse workings of government. Force is to fall before it.

It must not be inferred from these remarks, that I am an enemy to all restraint. Restraint in some form or other is an essential law of our nature, a necessary discipline, running through life, and not to be escaped by any art or violence. Where can we go, and not meet it? The powers of nature are, all of them, limits to human power. A never-ceasing force of gravity chains us to the earth. Mountains, rocks, precipices, and seas forbid our advances. If we come to society, restraints multiply on us. Our neighbor's rights limit our own. His property is forbidden ground. Usage restricts our free action, fixes our manners, and the language we must speak, and the modes of pursuing our ends. Business is a restraint, setting us wearisome tasks, and driving us through the same mechanical routine day after day. Duty is a restraint, imposing curbs on passion, enjoining one course and forbidding another, with stern voice, with uncompromising authority. Study is a restraint, compelling us, if we would learn any thing, to concentrate the forces of thought, and to bridle the caprices of fancy. All law, divine or human, is, as the name imports, restraint. No one feels more than I do the need of this element of human life. He who would fly from it must live in perpetual conflict with nature, society, and himself.

But all this does not prove that liberty, free action, is not an infinite good, and that we should seek and guard it with sleepless jealousy. For if we look at the various restraints of which I have spoken, we shall see that liberty is the end and purpose of all. Nature's powers around us hem us in, only to rouse a free power within us. It acts that we should react. Burdens press on us, that the soul's elastic force should come forth. Bounds are set, that we should clear them. The weight, which gravitation fastens to our limbs, incites us to borrow speed from winds and steam, and we fly where we seemed doomed to creep. The sea, which first stopped us, becomes the path to a new hemisphere. The sharp necessities of life, cold, hunger, pain, which chain man to toil, wake up his faculties, and fit him for wider action. Duty restrains the passions, only that the nobler faculties and affections may have freer play, may ascend to God, and embrace all his works. Parents impose restraint, that the child may learn to go alone, may outgrow authority. Government is ordained, that the rights and freedom of each and all may be inviolate. In study thought is confined, that it may penetrate the depths of truth, may seize on the great laws of nature, and take a bolder range. Thus freedom, ever-expanding action, is the end of all just restraint. Restraint, without this end, is a slavish yoke. How often has it broken the young spirit, tamed the heart and the intellect, and made social life a standing pool. We were made for free action.

Channing, William E. (1841)

Introductory Remarks. Solonian Reprints, No. 1
pp. 9-10.