Eliminate all laws

In an "Effective Listening" class at Toastmasters last night, I was privileged to be the "speaker" in the first exercise. One other person in our group suggested one of the 29 speech options, "What existing laws should be eliminated," and I agreed.

While I think the question was to generate more narrow selections, such as the laws around drug possession, it is my opinion, which I expressed, that all laws should be eliminated on the way to their complete replacement with much simpler laws. These simpler laws can be summarized even more simply as: "Do the right thing."

The problem is that the current laws are mostly just protection for legalized theft, theft by government entities, theft by corporations, theft by corrupt lawyers, ... All of these thieves wriggle out of their punishment and full restitution through the loopholes many of them have built into the laws. My prime example was the Simmons Mattress company who through a series of leveraged buyouts made all of the five purchasers money, phenomenal money, but loaded the formerly reasonably profitable company down with so much debt that this recent recession meant that they couldn't produce and sell enough mattresses to pay on the debt. They are now bankrupt and their employees are out of jobs. There ought to be a law...

There is. In fact there are millions of them. When combined with all the regulations that have the force of law, there are even more. I'm no lawyer but the robbery of the Simmons Mattress company to the point of insolvency was probably legal. What's more, even if it weren't, there is no redress. The five purchasers who made money just by buying and selling Simmons and didn't contribute to its business at all, will not have to give any of their profits back, will not have to make whole their robbery victims. Even if they did, it would be unlikely that any of the money would go to the business, just the last creditors.

One of the participants in my subteam commented on a ticket they just received in San Francisco. Her father just passed away and she was driving his former car in San Francisco only to receive a $60 ticket because it has a plastic cover over the license plate. San Francisco has a "law" that prohibits plastic covers as they may make the traffic light cameras ineffective. Not that they do, or in point of fact, that the one that her father had on his car for years did, or that she or he ever operated the car illegally, let alone by running a red light even at an intersection with a camera.

Yes, all we need is one page's worth of laws that boils down to "do what's right," disallow ill gotten gains from doing wrong, and further provide full compensation for the victims however long it takes.