Congress? We Don't Need No Stinking Congress.

Manmade law is an abomination. (DN 2.11)

Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |

(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 1.9 | 1.10 | 1.11 | 1.12 | 1.13 | 1.14 | 1.15 | 1.16 | 1.17 | 1.18 | 1.19 |1.20 | 1.21 |1.22

(Part II) What: 2.0 | 2.1 | 2.2 | 2.3 | 2.4 | 2.5 | 2.6 | 2.7 | 2.8 | 2.9 | 2.10 I 2.11

Chapter 2.11:
Principles and Protocols, 1

Nature is a totally efficient, self-regenerating system. IF we discover the laws that govern this system and live synergistically within them, sustainability will follow and humankind will be a success.

—R. Buckminster Fuller

As we have established, different framework efforts are distinguished in part by their order of operations. What goals do they prioritize? In what order?

The distributed nation begins with you, the human person. The distributed nation also lionizes your property, or the sovereign space you occupy, as essential to your life.

But we must have some cohering factor. We must have things that cause us to gather. To form into a nation. The first of those cohering factors is a set of simple principles.

Yet nothing stays simple for long. So let us take a closer look at those principles.

Needless to say, our core goal is freedom. We want to live in a world in which the consent of the human person is respected in all things.

Of course, we are not trying to impose anything on anyone else. Maybe some people like being bossed around and controlled. Maybe they want to pretend that they consented to an obviously nonconsensual system. Fine. We are not trying to take that away from anyone.

Just leave us out of it.

Escaping the existing system will not be easy. One of the obstacles is the phenomenon of law. We are piled high with laws we do not need, imposed by an authority to which none of us ever consented.

Here, of course, we are not referring to natural law, but manmade law (code law, positive law, civil law, Roman law). These are laws invented by legislators, rulers, or bureaucrats and then imposed by the apparatus of the state.

Natural law is woven into the fabric of everything. Manmade law is a stain upon that fabric.

To frame this concept, let us provide a little historical context. This will be highly simplified, and from Anglophone history specifically, but it will get the job done…

Prior to 1066, the job of kings was not to invent and impose laws. Their job was to interpret and enforce natural law.

Wise men and judges helped. They were discovering natural law, not making up laws out of whole cloth. This process eventually morphed into the phenomenon of the common law.

In a common-law system, courts—judges, juries, and advocates—attempt to reach decisions consonant with an organic human understanding of natural law. As disputes and difficult questions are adjudicated, a body of decisions slowly grows, driven by a progressive aggregation of common sense. Common law is the accumulation of human wisdom, rooted in natural law.

The Normans across the Channel were centralizers and legal absolutists, and after 1066, William imposed a strict and oppressive feudalism upon the whole of England. Informed by the phenomenon of Roman law, they carried with them a very continental idea: that leaders have the authority to create and impose any laws they wish.

This produced a backlash in the native Saxon population, and forged a distinction that still remains 1,000 years later. On the continent, and throughout much of the rest of the world, the voice of Justinian still echoes. Most countries follow the Roman-law idea that laws can and should be created to govern every aspect of human life. Anglophone countries, by contrast, are common-law countries.

One way to understand the distinction was offered by Daniel Hannan in his masterly Inventing Freedom: Roughly speaking, in a common-law system, all is permitted unless it is specifically prohibited; in a civil-law system, all is prohibited unless it is specifically permitted. The latter wants to pass laws for everything.

Unfortunately, the Saxon resistance to the Norman Yoke was incomplete…

In 1215, at Runnymede, the Barons attempted to bring the execrable King John to heel with Magna Carta. Lovers of liberty have long revered this pivotal moment in the story of human liberty, and rightly so. But it carried with it the seeds of future problems, for it led ultimately to the creation of institutions we do not need: the British Parliament, and all the legislatures that have followed in its wake.

I know that is heresy to say in a world that is drunk on DemocracyMystique™-flavored Kool Aid, but it is true nonetheless. Even if we stipulate to the idea that we needed parliaments in order to help us end the phenomenon of nonconsensual hereditary authority, they have definitely outlived their usefulness and overstayed their welcome.

The reason is simple: they invent laws, and inventing laws is bad.

To simplify a trenchant observation by Mark Passio: If a manmade law is consonant with natural law, then it is redundant and unnecessary. If a manmade law violates natural law, then it is immoral and impermissible.

What we need, then, is not an ever-growing body of manmade laws. All we need is a blueprint—a set of protocols effecting the moral principles that emanate from natural law.

Any such protocols we lay down on paper will be instantly recognizable to virtually every person who has, does, or will ever draw breath, because they will be drawn from something that is universally and organically true. Because they will be rooted deep in the soil of natural law.

Of course, perfection is impossible, which is why we will also need a common-law process—to adjudicate disagreements and search for the best possible answers to difficult questions.

Undergirded by the principles and protocols of natural law, common law bubbles up from an ongoing aggregation of human wisdom, resulting in continued improvement over time. Like the free market, language, and other natural human things, common law is an emergent phenomenon.

Civil laws, by contrast, are invented and imposed from the top down by individual politicians with God-only-knows-what motivations, biases, and corrupting influences. Civil law is an accumulation of layer after layer of barnacles so deep that the original structure is crushed and vanishes altogether.

We will not be doing that.

Max Borders describes the difference concisely:

When it comes to emergence, we must understand the difference between protocols and plans. The former enables order to emerge, while the latter limits emergence.

Manmade (civil/positive/Roman) law is a form of central planning.

I know that we classical liberals in the West have long seen ourselves (rightly so) as opponents of all forms of totalitarian collectivism, and the central planning by which they are characterized. But the congresses and parliaments we so proudly lionized as part of what made our countries “free” have, in fact, been engaged in a lite version of the oppression we opposed. A legislature, after all, is a small group of people making plans for the rest of us and then imposing those plans by force.

In Keynes vs. Hayek: Fight of the Century, the question at issue is

Which way should we choose?
More bottom-up or more top-down?

Hayek answers the question definitively:

I don’t want to do nothing, there’s plenty to do
The question I ponder is who plans for whom?
Do I plan for myself or leave it to you?
I want plans by the many, not by the few.

We are done with edicts being imposed upon us from on high, whether they be from kings or politicians we (supposedly) elected. Others may like it that way. Others may enjoy being controlled and told what to do, and that is their right. We are not trying to tell anyone else what they should do.

But some of us are ready to evolve. And evolution requires a move away from top-down central planning and toward something a lot simpler…

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