Too Many Laws - GOOD LAWS ARE USELESS WHEN ENFORCED BY BAD PEOPLE

Too Many Laws!
GOOD LAWS ARE USELESS WHEN ENFORCED BY BAD PEOPLE
by Ted Lang

July 8, 2002

Columnist Ted Lang Reflecting on the WorldCom, Xerox and Martha Stewart stock market and business irregularities, President Bush uttered the battle cry so popular with big government zealots and their feeble-minded sheeple: "There oughta’ be a law!" In fact, there used to be a cartoon by that name. But if it were up to me, I’d offer to hell with creating another worse-than-useless stupid law, and prefer the cartoon instead!

As was pointed out in previous columns, there are already plenty of laws on the books. In fact, the IRS code has more pages than the Bible, and the SEC’s laws have worked just fine for quite a while. So why does Bush need more laws?

In the June 29th issue of Financial Times.com, the publication offered "Bush urges laws to restore investor trust." They quote Bush: "No violation of the public’s trust will be tolerated. The federal government will be vigilant in prosecuting wrongdoers to ensure that investors and workers maintain the highest confidence in American business." "Wrongdoers?" Are they similar to "evildoers?"

The article continues: "The president used a weekly radio address to assure Americans about the health of the economy and upbraid executives suspected of wrongdoing, as further news of the scale of improper accounting at Xerox, the copier group, capped a week dominated by the discovery of an apparent $3.8 billion financial fraud at WorldCom, the telecommunications group."

To add insult to injury, FT.com goes on: "Mr. Bush praised the Securities and Exchange Commission for swiftly filing a suit against WorldCom this week to prevent the company from shredding documents or making large payouts to executives pending a probe." Well that should make investors, pensioners and the American taxpayer sure feel secure. Legal action has been taken to prevent shredding! What if the suit-and-tie crooks just burn the documents – would that be OK with Bush and his SEC?

What we have here is the futility of the ignorant and the unimaginative. If airline hijackers used box cutters to commandeer an airliner, now there will be laws against box cutters, nail files, large keys, tweezers and anything of similar threatening design because some criminal used them to successfully pull off a crime. Isn’t it already a crime to hijack an airliner with any weapon? It is evidence of the stupidity of politicians and government bureaucratic quacks and retards who focus on an object instead of a practice. It won’t be long before the educrat dim-bulbs, idiots and imbeciles of the National Education Association and their brainless humanoid "teachers" and administrators start punishing little boys for the egregious simulated criminal activity identified as "shredding."

The latest absurdity pandering to the despicable fraud offered up by politicians that we are a nation of laws totally ignores the unethical and immoral practice of falsifying information on financial reports of corporations that publicly trade stocks and other securities. What about already existent laws put in place with their intent of being enforced by the SEC to prevent the type of fraud represented by Enron, Global Crossing, Xerox and WorldCom? Why weren’t these enforced? Why weren’t preventative measures already in place simply utilized to protect the public?

The chief causative factors in the airline hijackings were Arab males twenty to forty years of age. Someone came up with the "feel-good" concept that profiling is wrong; no it’s not, it saves the lives of law-abiding citizens. But since when does our bureaucratically focused government care about law-abiding citizens? Searching, interrogating and focusing on Arab airline passengers would be a preventive measure most effective in dealing with future terrorist threats; but is our government employing such preventative measures?

Why weren’t preventative SEC measures followed to preclude the current array of business and securities frauds? Clearly, "campaign finance reform" restricting our First Amendment freedoms will not even remotely address the real problem here, which are payoffs to strategically situated politicians postured to relax SEC rules and preventative measures, thereby allowing for phony "pro forma" reporting fraud, conflict-of-interest consulting/auditing, and accounting tricks to make bad stuff look good or to keep it off the records.

It is obvious that more laws assist criminals and charlatans by making it more difficult to spot wrongdoers, evildoers, and others who make breaking them easier because of the camouflage of complexity. And no matter how good the law, it is breakable by a determined immoral and unethical government official or corrupt capitalist. An ounce of prevention is indeed worth a pound of cure, but good laws are useless when enforced by bad people. ***

Photo of Columnist Ted Lang courtesy of the author