I subscribe to Doug Casey’s communique and regularly receive articles which I always read intently, sometimes more than once, and from which I usually learn something, even if nothing more than to buttress and bolster my own viewpoint. The most recent one did just that, commenting on the system in American society which we call “justice”, and proposing a logical, well-reasoned solution to the problem. I have reprinted it here in verbatim and added nothing. If you want to see the original, click on the link below. For the record, I am in complete agreement with Casey’s argument.
Doug Casey on the Failures of the Justice System and a Viable Solution International Man: What is the role of a justice system in a society, and what should the State have to do with it? Doug Casey: In my view, what really holds a society together isn’t the laws enacted by legislatures or dictators, but peer pressure, social opprobrium, and moral approbation. In general, society is pretty self-regulating. It’s why people pay their bills at restaurants even though there’s not a cop at the door. Criminals are the exception, not the rule—although, it must be said, they naturally gravitate towards the government. When somebody commits a crime, there’s a trial to determine what harm has been done, who should be compensated, and so forth. Courts determine these things. But I would argue that the state is not a necessary part of any of this. Society, like markets, tends to be self-ordering. With a minimal “night watchman” sort of state like that described by Ayn Rand, the proper role of government is simply to defend you from force and fraud. This implies an army to defend you from force external to your society, a police force to defend you from force within your society, and a court system to allow the adjudication of disputes without resorting to force. I could live in a society like that—it would be a vast improvement over what we have now. A proper court system, with either arbitrators or judges and juries system, would be part of it. But I’d go on to argue that juries and courts should be privatized. International Man: What would a privatized justice system look like? Would it have juries? Doug Casey: There might be either arbitrators, or juries, or both. The jury should be composed of independent thinkers who aren’t easily swayed by rhetoric or pressured by groupthink. Today, however, they’re just random people who aren’t clever enough to avoid jury duty. In theory, juries can counter the tremendous power of judges. Judges today are either elected or appointed. If elected, they have to campaign like any other politician and are subject to the same perverse incentives any other politician is. If they are appointed, it can be even worse. Appointees are often just collecting political favors. While they’re allegedly more independent, in many ways, they’re even less accountable. In theory, a jury is a good counterbalance to the power of the judge. You need some way to weigh the facts and decide who’s in the right. But the way juries work in the US today is far from optimal. It used to be that a jury could easily overturn any law. The process was called jury nullification, and it was an effective way for the common people to keep legislators under control. Today, however, it’s really a dead letter. Today’s juries amount to a form of involuntary servitude. You get your notice for jury duty, and you either have to serve, whether you want to or not or come up with excuses the state will deign to accept. Most productive people feel that they have more urgent priorities in their lives than helping decide court cases that can go on for months. So the type of people who end up serving on juries these days generally have nothing better to do or for whom the trivial fee they pay is good money. Hardly the kind of person who should decide weighty matters, perhaps even life and death. In addition, many trials center on highly technical concepts, and forms of evidence, that people rounded up from the highways and byways are simply unqualified to interpret. Worse, there’s the jury selection process called voir dire. The notion is to give the attorneys of both sides the opportunity to remove a few individuals from the jury who might be biased against their case, thus ensuring a more unbiased jury. But in practice, it’s an interrogation process by which lawyers try to ensure they get a jury that will believe whatever they tell them. This usually means that anyone exhibiting the least bit of independent thinking or is prone to value justice over law enforcement will get removed and never serve on a jury. The result is that the quality of juries today is several standard deviations below what it should be. Any intelligent person has opinions, and in this day of the Internet, almost any person’s opinions are easy to find out. No matter which way your opinions line up, one side or the other isn’t going to like them in any case, so you won’t make it past voir dire. Both the prosecution and defense like to see malleable jurors with easily influenced minds. As a result, the typical juror has no opinions other than those on the weather, sports, and American Idol. People who think in concepts are weeded out as troublemakers. This process makes a shambles of the concept of a “jury of your peers.”The type of people they rope into jury duty wouldn’t likely be the peers of anyone now reading this. If I were facing a trial, I’d much rather be tried by twelve people randomly selected out of a phone book than by the type of people who get selected for jury duty. If we’re to have juries, they ought to be truly juries of our peers—people who can understand you and the facts pertaining to your case. But we’re far from an ideal system. It’s worse than arbitrary; given that most of those employed by the justice system work for the state, and that it’s the state vs. an individual in so many cases, there’s a huge inherent bias on top of the whole problem with today’s stacked juries. International Man: What is an ideal justice system in your perspective? Doug Casey: It would be a more equitable system if judges and jurors were professionals who had to compete with each other on the basis of their proven records of intelligence, fairness, speed, and low cost. The victim and the accused would mutually agree on the judge and jury or arbitrators. Separating justice and state would help eliminate the state’s ability to prosecute phony, made-up crimes, especially crimes with no victims. There needs to be an actual victim to press charges if the state can’t be party to a case. That alone would eliminate the wasted resources and trashed lives resulting from the US’s various wars against victimless crimes. No one could be criminally prosecuted for having unorthodox sexual preferences, using unpopular drugs, drinking on Sunday, or smoking in a private establishment. Or for evading taxes. It might surprise Americans to know that tax evasion is a civil, not a criminal, matter in most countries. Most legal actions focus on matters of tort and breach of contract. It’s important to keep the laws simple and few, so ignorance of the law is impossible. Ideally, just two great laws: 1. Do all that you say you’re going to do. 2. Don’t aggress against other people or their property. The point is that justice has to do with righting actual wrongs that have been done to people, not enforcing laws and exacting arbitrary punishments. Today justice means enforcing the will of politicians and bureaucrats. A proper system of justice would focus on making the victim whole, not arbitrarily punishing the aggressor. With privatized justice, someone would accuse another, both sides would choose an arbitrator (professional or otherwise), and those two arbitrators would agree on a third to make sure there were no tied votes. They would look at all the facts—not just the arbitrary subset of facts allowed by legal precedent and state machinations. That decision would not be about punishing anyone but about making the harmed party whole again. The key concepts are justice and restitution, not punishment. Punishment, if you actually think about it, rarely serves any useful purpose; it just gives vent to base and reactive emotions. It may set a “good example” to deter future miscreants, but it definitely sets a bad example for society as a whole by institutionalizing and justifying cruelty. International Man: Is there any hope for the current justice system? Doug Casey: The whole system is highly politicized, which is only natural for something run by the state. Unfortunately, as the country increasingly looks to government as a solution—your only choice being to choose between so-called “right” and “left” politics. That’s going to make the current legal system even more dysfunctional in every way I can think of. International Man: What are the implications of this for investors and businesses? Doug Casey: I see people being convicted under ridiculous applications of the securities laws, tax laws, and more. The only area where things are becoming more rational and freer is the area of drug laws. It’s becoming clear to even the dimmest legislators and jurists that they’re as stupid and destructive as were those against alcohol during Prohibition. In fact, almost all the administrative laws of the myriad of three- and four-letter agencies—ATF, FTC, EPA, SEC, FDA, etc., etc.—create bogus and even nonsensical “crimes.” Even if you aren’t convicted, if you’re targeted, it can cost you hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in legal fees, plus time, lost business, and damaged reputation. The system has become rapacious and Kafkaesque. And as the state grabs more and more power with each passing crisis, the risk of attention from state operatives increases, even for innocent and honest people. The trend is accelerating in a negative direction. If history is any guide, things will get worse until we reach a genuine crisis. That’s bad news for anyone with any wealth, especially if they have unpopular political views. That has very serious implications. Not just for people in business and investors, but society itself. This is one reason I’m so bearish on the prospects of the current world order; not only are there decades-long distortions in the economy that have to be liquidated, but the whole legal system is rotten to the core. It needs to be scrapped—someone needs to push the reset button and restore justice as its guiding principle—and that, too, is a distortion that can’t be corrected easily or painlessly. Unfortunately, it seems as if it’s the very worst people who have their fingers on “The Great Reset” button. |
Poor Roger's Almanac 
“…According to Habakkuk 1:7, not only did the Chaldeans’ authority originate with themselves, but so did their justice. And so does the justice of We the People: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice….”
What an audacious assertion. Only Yahweh is just, and only He can establish justice:
“In a lecture entitled The Common Law, Constitutional Attorney Herb Titus claimed that the Preamble’s assertion that WE THE PEOPLE established justice did not authorize ‘the national government to define justice.’57 However, because the Constitution never declares Yahweh’s law the standard for determining justice, the definition of justice has always been left to the federal and state governments. Instead of confirming the justice inherent in Yahweh’s morality and already established in His perfect law, the framers’ declaration implies that justice had yet to be established. This (and other numerous confirmations throughout the Constitution) reveals they preferred their own justice to the justice of Yahweh.
“Anytime autonomous man attempts to establish justice outside Yahweh’s moral laws, the result is always injustice. In Isaiah 5:20, this transposition is depicted as calling good evil and evil good. The word “autonomous” comes from two Greek words: auto meaning self and nomos meaning law. The word, which literally means “self-law,” is just another way of describing humanism and, in this instance, constitutionalism….”
For more, see Chapter 3 “The Preamble: We the People vs. Yahweh” of free online book “Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective” at https://www.bibleversusconstitution.org/BlvcOnline/blvc-index.html
Then, Chapter 6 “Article 3: Judicial Usurpation.”
Find out how much you really know about the Constitution as compared to the Bible. Take our 10-question Constitution Survey in the sidebar and receive a free copy of the 85-page “Primer” of “BL vs. USC.”
In Casey’s entire article, nothing was ever said about the Constitution of the United States nor its claim to establish “justice”. Not once, so let’s abandon the topic and get down to the nuts and bolts of his argument.
Assuming your thesis is correct, what did Casey say that you agree with? Or disagree with? Why? How closely did his script follow the Old Testament law which you say defines justice? Or was it completely out of whack because he didn’t mention Yahweh either?
The floor is yours. Please explain HOW you would apply your version of the law in today’s society and why is that better than Casey’s or mine?
Good morning, Roger!
Casey’s article didn’t need to mention the Constitution for my response to to be relevant. That’s because my principal point was not about the Constitution as it was about, for example, Psalm 89:14.
“Justice and judgment are the habitation of thy [Yahweh’s] throne: mercy and truth shall go before thy face.”(Psalm 89:14)
Moreover, I’m not interested in mine, yours, Casey’s, or anyone else’s “version” of the law, but in the law (that is, the Lawgiver’s triune moral law, per Isaiah 33:22 & James 4:12) itself,* which is the only thing that can save America from the precipice upon which she teeters, as well as provide a society like we all desire. For example:
“The law of Yahweh is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of Yahweh is sure, making wise the simple. The *statutes* of Yahweh are right, rejoicing the heart: the *commandment* of Yahweh is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of Yahweh is clean, enduring for ever: the *judgments* of Yahweh are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. Moreover by them is thy servant warned: and in keeping of them there is great reward.” (Psalm 19:7-11)
See also Deuteronomy 4:5-8, 28:1-14, Romans 31, and a plethora a of others.
*No one’s “version” of the law is required, nor necessary, for example when it comes to the Eighth Commandment “Thou shalt not steal” and the statutes that explain what God considers stealing, and the civil judgments that enforce the Commandment and its statutes.
It’s merely a matter of whether were going to accept his law and apply it our own lives and, Lord willing, one day in society as a whole.
For more on how the Bible’s triune and integral moral law (the Ten Commandments and their respective statutes and judgments) apply and should be implemented as the law of the land, see free online book “Law & Kingdom: Their Relevance Under the New Covenant” at https://www.bibleversusconstitution.org/law-kingdomFrame.html
Then “A Biblical Constitution: A Scriptural Replacement for Secular Government.”
Ted, try this on for size. It is an article I wrote in 2012 concerning the “theft” of an item. If you were the man hearing this case, how would you have ruled? No theology, no sermons, just plain speaking about the injustice of the matter and how it should have been addressed. Note that I have laid out my “version” in detail.
Thanks for asking.
First, who we are, how we act, what we think, and what we say and/or write – all of it – is an expression of one’s theology.
The excellent article you wrote is all about theology, especially as it relates to the Bible’s requirement for restitution, which requires two to five times restitution, depending upon the nature of the crime. In turn, this makes it much more of a deterrent than if it would be if restitution was merely of an equivalent value.
Not being familiar with the details, it appears to me that, in this case, it would require four times restitution. If the person whose flag was burned was a flag maker (of flags other than the Stars and Stripes) from which he got his livelihood, it would be five times restitution.
The Bible also allows for a beating/caning at the discretion of the judge adjudicating the case.
That said, if if were the Stars and Stripes, representing the United States of America, aka the biblically egregious Constitutional Republic, it would be a different matter, depending upon the person’s motives for burning it.
Under a biblical government, if the flag, as representative of the idolatry involved with the Constitution and its government, were destroyed in the same fashion/reason as God law requires of all idols, then there would be no judgment for the one responsible for ridding his community of the idolatrous Stars and Stripes representing the United States of America, responsible for all but destroying America.
Thank you. This is more of the type of response I would like to see.
Welcome!