Laws

A while ago some blowhard on the radio proudly proclaimed that we are a nation of laws as if this was some praiseworthy feature unique to our culture.  Why this should be a point of pride is hard to understand, since laws are pretty widespread throughout our species.  Even the Taliban have laws, which largely seem to boil down to “Do what we say or we will shoot you.”
Long long ago and far far away, God himself handed over a list of all the laws he figured were important, and you could tell it was a Jewish god because right up there even before “No Killing” and “No Groping the Interns” was “Be nice to your Mom.” But the important thing is that there were only 10 of them.  They were easy to understand, and you could reasonably expect everybody to know what they were.  When you were told that you are not to steal, it was not felt necessary to explain in great detail what that meant. There was no talk of technicalities. If you were caught stealing, the townsfolk would gather and then they would cut off your hand or stone you to death or some other unmistakable deterrent to any others who might harbor notions of larceny.  I imagine theft was rare.
In stark contrast, let’s consider our legal underpinnings of which we are so proud.  That would be the United States Code, a monument to garrulous obfuscation by 250 years of congressional representatives with too much time on their hands. It is composed of not ten, not even 20, but of 50 sections or Titles, each of which contains hundreds if not thousands of pages of rules any one of which you break at your peril, bearing in mind that ignorance of the law is no excuse.
The main titles cover such diverse areas as Banking, Commerce, Patents, Indians, Agriculture and 45 others.  Nobody knows what is in all of these titles and very few people know what is in any of them.  Take Title 26, for example.  That’s the Federal Tax Code.  It turns out that a random sample of Republican congresspersons guessed that the tax code might be anything from 774,000 to 500 million words in length or somewhere between 2500 to 2,500,000 pages.  Many couched their guesses in terms of bible equivalents, that is something between 2 and 7 times the length of the bible which was clocked at 1291 pages.  I think a Republican’s estimate of the length of the bible may be considered reliable, but I would prefer a second opinion on anything else.
Fortunately, the Government Printing Office is available to backstop Our Elected Officials, and according to this credible source Title 26 runs to 3,387 pages of turgid, incomprehensible prose.  Of course that’s only the part Congress wrote.  In addition to that, there are the refinements that have been added by the Internal Revenue Service, and these run to an additional 13,458 pages.  (It is not clear if this includes the 721 forms involved in the lawful execution of their duties) That’s 13 bible equivalents and does not include such thoughts on the subject as the states may have codified.  In the end, it seems likely that various levels of government have covered something like 20,000 pages in rules that must be obeyed and the specification of punishment for those who fail to do so.
This would be Really Bad News if there was any chance that we might get caught not doing something, but fortunately the steely-eyed centurions with the hand-cuffs don’t know the rules any better than the rest of us, so their failure to apprehend civilians claiming ignorance of the law is a galling source of rage and frustration, sending dozens of them straight to the analyst’s couch.
But what we started out with, remember, were a few basic easy-to-handle felonies, and a quick scrutiny of the list of our 50 Titles suggests that the greater part of them have been lumped all together into Title 18 – Crimes and Criminal Procedure.  The first of the 5 sections of this 836-page Title lists the crimes that are sternly dealt with.  There are 123 listed, but some have subcategories, like number 113 (Stolen Property), 113A (Telemarketing Fraud), 113B (Terrorism), and 113C (Torture). Indians get their own number (#53), while Gambling and Genocide have to share #50.  And now, having studied this list carefully I am stunned by God’s lack of imagination in proscribed activities.  How could he have missed #9 Bankruptcy or #59 Liquor Traffic.  
Nevertheless, it is hard to argue that a culture that is governed by a succinct legal code that everybody knows and understands is inferior to a system of laws that is so vast and convoluted that a very extensive and expensive industry has grown and prospered whose practitioners justify their bloated fees by claiming, with some justice, that they, and only they, can guide the uninitiated through the tangled wreckage of our laws, of which we are so proud.