Requiescat Rule of Law
The global economic crisis precipitated by gamblers on Wall Street has everyone in a tizzy. Let's hope they stay that way long enough to break some old habits, in particular the "American Dream" belief that you can keep getting something for nothing indefinitely. The worst thing that could happen now is for the stock market to rally dramatically, offering a plausible excuse to breathe a great collective sigh of relief and declare the crisis averted so we could "get back to normal" and drive the world further down the road to ruin. TANSTAAFL, folks! If anyone seems to be eating a free lunch, it's probably yours.
The media are presently enjoying a feeding frenzy over the AIG scandal. Everything meaningful has already been said, but it's been a while since the pundits have had a long enough lull in fresh news to really squeeze every last drop of emotional currency out of one topic, and that's what they know best, so it goes on and on. Out of boredom comes vacuum polarization, however, and this old news has brought a new realization to light for me: we are about to give up the "rule of law" once and for all.
You don't have to be a lawyer to understand why AIG wrote contracts with their top (albeit crooked and incompetent) execs to secure their promises not to jump ship as soon as their stocks hit the fan. You don't have to be a lawyer to understand that these contracts are legally binding; the current AIG management doesn't get to say, "We changed out minds." But said management is catching hell from everyone for not saying exactly that. Well, it plays to the heartstrings of the victims, so whoever keeps beating that dead horse will get more votes or viewers, so this is unsurprising. However, like many other understandable phenomena, it has potentially dire consequences.
Let's review the last 6 or 7 years: one legacy of the Bush Administration is the erosion of the rule of law. If the President can say, "Screw the Law!" any time it suits him, and get away with it, why not the rest of us? If I took out a mortgage for $500,000 and now my house is only worth $200,000 then tough noogies for the bank, right? If I bought a share of stock for $100 and it's now worth nothing because the guy who sold it to me was a crook, somebody else better reimburse me for my loss, because otherwise it wouldn't be fair.
Now, speaking of fairness, it would seem entirely fair to pass a law saying that any contract entered into by a crook with crooked intent would be null and void if that intent could be proven in court; in fact, for all I know there may be such a law, although perhaps not worded like that. But it would still require an expensive trial and only the lawyers would go away happy. That's what the rule of law means, and despite the hatred for lawyers that results, it works better than the alternative, which is saying, "Screw that. I ain't paying." Because if one person can say that, everyone else can say it too. And believe me, a lot of people are now highly motivated to do just that.
For this reason, I think the people playing to the audience are taking a big risk. Once people get a taste of screwing the law over money, a lot of light bulbs are going to start flickering over their heads, and at that point we may break from the tradition of settling disagreements by popular vote and/or constitutional legislation. Would that be a bad thing? Who knows? But there are a lot of features of Western Civilization that I kind of like, and it would be sad to see them gone forever.
-- Jick 09:46, 25 March 2009 (PDT)
