VolkStudio Blog

I just found out that dashboard video recorders that are ubiquitous in Russia and fairly common in the US are illegal in Austria and Switzerland. It’s a bit difficult to have any respect for laws when they are as arbitrary as this.

Anther example: sound suppressors are over the counter items in New Zealand and France, forbidden or very heavily restricted in many other countries. Again, hard to consider most laws as necessary or even helpful when their absence causes no visible problems.

A passing a law indicates such a grave concern that its authors approve of using government troops — and police are a type of troops — to eradicate some practice, property or belief. At various times, laws forbade things that we find benign or irrelevant, and often enforced the prohibitions with deadly force, torture and bloody mayhem.

It would be strange to Americans if cops arrested people for having catnip or coffee, but they consider harsh sentences for other herbs or seeds to be normal. And Americans walking around with folding knives in their pockets wonder why British or German cops would arrest people for that. Attitudes evolve over time, too. Used to be that dynamite was freely available in stores and condoms were not…and even advertising them was risky.

Unnecessary prohibitions that aren’t enforced merely erode what little respect lawmakers had to begin with. Enforced prohibitions immediately mark politicians and police as the enemy of the people, and eventually the first reaction to headlines about dead cops becomes “I wonder what they did to deserve it?” Nobody even wonders about most of the politicians, elected or appointed.