About 2,600 years ago, a man named Anacharsis came to Athens. He met Solon, the ancient Greek "law giver" and was told about Solon's project to create a system of laws for the people of Athens. Anacharsis reflected on this idea and disagreed with it, pointing out that the web of laws would be much like a spider's web - able to capture the weak and powerless, but ineffective against those with significant power.
In mid-May of 2014, Leonard Pitts, Jr., a columnist for the Miami Herald, published an essay about the same idea. In it, he reviewed the book The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi. Here are a few of the stories in that book, chosen by Pitts for their impact.
Patrick Jewell rolled a tobacco cigarette and smoked it outside a New York City subway station. He was thrown against a wall by an angry man, tried to escape, had his head slammed against the concrete by a gang of men in black jackets, was thrown into a van, and charged with smoking marijuana and resisting arrest. As Pitts and Taibbi describe this incident, it is "policing tactics so aggressive as to be downright fascistic." And it is certainly not the only case in the book. Any book is a limited listing of such events, so I suggest you try a news search on "police brutality" to get a sense of how many stories you would encounter if you looked for such data.
On the other hand, there are those people who were directly, personally responsible for the financial meltdown that we all experienced between 2006 and 2012. Why aren't any of them in jail? Pitts quotes Taibbi quoting a federal prosecutor who said that some people are not appropriate for jail. Then Pitts reflects on the outrageousness of such a claim, that people who wear suits and steal billions shouldn't be jailed, while someone who wears blue jeans and rolls his own tobacco cigarettes should be beaten half to death and falsely accused of crimes he did not commit.
Readers of George Orwell's classic Animal Farm will recognise the summary Pitts gives for this situation: "...some of us are more equal than others." Pitts then goes on to wonder why people aren't in an uproar.
Of course, there were people in an uproar beginning in September 2011, calling themselves Occupy Wall Street. The Occupy movement spread rapidly around the country, and involved public occupation of parks and streets in dozens of cities. People tried to express outrage, and billionaires like Michael Bloomberg used the power of their offices to have the police attack and arrest many hundreds of them. Possibly, people are expressing their outrage privately, since public demonstrations have evidently fallen on deaf ears.
It does make you wonder, though, about the people in the bitcoin industry who are calling for regulation. "Oh, please, let us show you how we are compliant," they shout. And compliant they are, of course, to whatever extent they can get away with, one presumes. They want to be regulated, just like all other financial institutions. Is that because they want to be bailed out, just like the big banks, and the insurance companies that became banks (State Farm, for example, now includes a State Farm Bank), or the auto finance companies that became banks (Ally Bank used to be General Motors Acceptance Corporation)? I suspect that the people in the bitcoin industry who clamour for regulation do want to be bailed out, do expect to engage in regulatory capture, are unethical, and do want to have a system of injustice that benefits them and screws over everyone else.
Injustice is epidemic. You see it in the Arab Spring. You see it in South Sudan. You see it in the United States, in Europe, in Russia, in China, everywhere you look. It isn't new.
Anacharsis noticed that a system of laws wasn't going to work. He made a point to say something to Solon, who ignored him and wrote a system of laws, anyway. Anacharsis was correct. For over two and a half millennia, people have been trying to make a system of laws work. During all of that time, systems of laws in various countries have produced injustice. People have been wrongly convicted. Poor people have been victimised by the police. Rich people have gotten away with theft and murder.
Maybe it is time to stop looking to governments and systems of laws to solve human problems. If you want people to be more just, don't tell them what to do with laws. Tell them why they should be more just.
If you want the bitcoin industry to be ethical, don't look to government regulators. There's zero evidence that government regulation has ever made anything more ethical. If you want to have the industry be more ethical, build tools that can be used by ethical people to secure their economic privacy.
Here at SilentVault, we've done some of that work. We think SilentVault is a useful tool for securing your economic privacy. We look forward to others doing similar work, and building even better tools.
The case against regulation is very simple. If you cannot trust people to make good choices, how can regulations written by people, imposed by people, and selectively enforced by people improve on that situation? If you cannot trust people who are not in government to choose wisely and be ethical, why do you think you can trust people who are in government?
If your answer is that you simply don't trust people in private life, but you do trust people in public life, then your answer is naive. You should do more research. If your answer is that you think that using force to make other people do what you think best is the way to go, then you should take some courses on ethics.
If your answer is mine, that you cannot trust other people to make good choices, so you choose for yourself, then you'll need to work at your own future. You will need tools like SilentVault to secure your economic privacy so you can build a future for yourself that makes sense.
When you think about it, after being advised that his web of laws wasn't going to limit the actions of the wealthy and powerful, since he went ahead and wrote them anyway, it seems clear that Solon wanted a system that harmed the weak and poor and benefited the wealthy and powerful. The idea that such a system would provide equal justice for everyone is simply false. Promoting government as a solution to injustice is deceitful.
Mankind has woven tangled webs of deceit over and over again. It might be time to try something else.