Editor's note: The original version of this column appeared in August 2001.
Have you noticed lately that some people are quick to accuse others they have never met of being "criminals"?
You likely have read or heard of them painting entire races and cultures of people with the same brush dipped in midnight black.
Now a bit of shocking news. None of us, including the loudmouthed critics, escapes this life without committing plenty of documentable crimes. In this over-lawyered society, we adults all have long been "criminals" many times over. Nowhere is this wholesale lawbreaking better described than in a 2001 article titled "Living the Outlaw Life" by journalist and researcher Claire Wolfe.
Wolfe says we all are outlaws to one degree or another. Obviously, some crimes are more serious and heinous than others. The laws we constantly break are largely contained in the federal, state and local books of laws and regulations, including the U.S. Code, which contains all federal statutes in 56,009 single-spaced pages. That tome occupies nine full feet of shelf space, according to those who wrote The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
Administrative statutes are crammed inside the 207-volume Code of Federal Regulations, which covers 21 feet and over 134,000 pages. Federal statutes are bolstered by more than 2,750 volumes of judicial precedent, which require 160 yards of shelf space.
Wolfe explains that during the Clinton years alone, federal agencies handed down 25,000 new regulations that criminalized acts such as placing snuff ads on race cars and ensuring reliable toilets. Before Bill Clinton's final year in the White House, the feds issued more than 100,000 pages of new regulations, she said.
And, like it or not, we're all constantly guilty of breaking one or another of these laws.
You've never "'forgotten' to report a little extra income on your 1040?" Wolfe asks, "built an addition on your house without a permit, driven without a seat belt, ... given a glass of wine to your 17-year-old, smoked a joint, disconnected a pollution control device on your car, cut a friend's hair without a license, installed an 'outlaw' toilet, ... put a dollar in a football pool, ... carried money with traces of cocaine on it (about 82 percent of the paper money in circulation today), put prescription medicine into one of those little daily dispenser containers, given your prescription pills to a sick friend, ... owned chemicals that might be used in bomb-making (like the bleach and ammonia bottles under your kitchen sink), ... or driven in a car with someone who might have been transporting contraband?"
How about torn the tag off a mattress or pillow? Driven above the posted speed limit? Disturbed the peace? Trespassed? Taken something that belongs to another? Lied on a government form under oath? Talked on your cell phone while driving?
Not any of those, eh? Oh, really?
These days, Wolfe says, a good person can be convicted of conspiracy for crimes he doesn't even know about, or for purchasing a legal item that may wind up being used illegally.
"You can even be convicted of violating laws that don't exist," she writes, bringing up an IRS case in which a citizen was convicted of violating a law which, because of the poor way it was written, was never even enforceable.
"Heaven forbid you should own a business and try to get through the day without committing a crime," Wolfe writes.
"Bottom line. You are no longer a law-abiding citizen. There are too many laws to abide. And it doesn't matter whether they call 'em laws, rules, regulations or something else. You break them every day. With laws like these, who even wants to be a law-abiding citizen? When you put yourself at the service of rules and dictates of this nature, you put your life in thrall to the kind of people who make them."
Wolfe's solution in the face of the "pathetic state of law and justice around you" is to become a free-spirited "outlaw." In other words, she says people should accept that they are doing the best they can do and understand that they break the laws of this land any number of times each week.
"Don't let me give you the wrong idea," Wolfe says. "You don't have to start holding up IRS offices and distributing the proceeds to starving taxpayers to be an outlaw. Whatever crimes you're already committing will do. The essence of free outlawry is the way you live in the face of growing tyranny--the outlaw way you think. ... In most cases, being an outlaw doesn't mean attracting attention to yourself. It simply means living, as much as possible, as you wish. More important, it means having the mindset needed to live that way in a world of adversity. More often than confronting, it means ignoring or evading insane and excessive rules."
So please, you who are so eager to judge others, spare me further holier-than-thou accusations against others when the walls of your glass houses are rattling from these constant, straight-line winds of continual outlawness.
Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].
Editorial on 07/11/2015