Human nature, he contends, has in our own times undergone a radical change, with the result that ordinary middle-class parents no longer care overmuch about the future that faces their children. I hope this doesn't mean that Mr. Gill has not devoted much thought to whether these results will occur, or that he does not much care. While generously applauding Steven Landsburg's remarkable book, Fair Play , Nicholas Schulz criticizes Landsburg's call to disobey bad laws. Landsburg's advocacy of solipsistic lawlessness is only apparent. But law and statutes are entirely different things.
Genuine law grows spontaneously out of the decentralized interactions of countless people.
Government can no more centrally plan the law than it can centrally plan industrial outputs and prices. Attempts at either sort of central planning generate perverse results. Statutes, in contrast to genuine law, are almost always arbitrary commands imposed upon citizens by the sovereign with threats of violence. That the sovereign is elected by a majority of voting citizens does little to render more law-like that sovereign's statutory commands. Legal central planning, like economic central planning, is no less absurd when practiced by democratic governments than when it is practiced by totalitarian thugs.