WEBVTT NOTE 2. Ditch the Planners 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.480 Ditch the Planners What is the Law of the Land? 2 00:00:06.480 --> 00:00:11.200 Many Americans are under the impression that it is the US Constitution, distorted by time, 3 00:00:11.200 --> 00:00:17.000 perhaps, and the plain meaning changed by bad or good, depending on your point of view, 4 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:20.760 amendment, court decision or indifference. 5 00:00:20.760 --> 00:00:23.000 This is a complete myth. 6 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:27.400 The actual Law of the Land is contained in the US Code, published every six years by 7 00:00:27.400 --> 00:00:30.680 by the Government Printing Office. 8 00:00:30.680 --> 00:00:34.760 No one so much as suggested such a thing as the US Code in the first hundred years after 9 00:00:34.760 --> 00:00:37.560 the Constitution was enacted. 10 00:00:37.560 --> 00:00:41.380 It would have been only a little longer than the Constitution itself. 11 00:00:41.380 --> 00:00:47.080 The first attempt to create such a compilation of laws occurred in 1878, but it languished, 12 00:00:47.080 --> 00:00:50.240 because no one felt the need to update it. 13 00:00:50.240 --> 00:00:56.140 Then, in 1926, in the midst of prohibition, when the Feds became deeply involved in regulating 14 00:00:56.140 --> 00:01:02.860 In the details of life, Congress made the thing come into existence. 15 00:01:02.860 --> 00:01:06.360 It is printed every six years. 16 00:01:06.360 --> 00:01:11.160 An institution was born, though most people know nothing of it. 17 00:01:11.160 --> 00:01:20.320 The next printing will come out in 2012, but the 2006, with annotations, was 356 1000-plus 18 00:01:20.320 --> 00:01:25.240 page volumes that cover every aspect of life as we know it. 19 00:01:25.240 --> 00:01:32.700 The next one will add many new sections and probably more than 100,000 pages. 20 00:01:32.700 --> 00:01:38.800 This is America's central plan – our own gauss plan, so to speak – and it is as elaborate 21 00:01:38.800 --> 00:01:43.640 and detailed as any set of laws that have ever governed any society in the history of 22 00:01:43.640 --> 00:01:45.960 the world. 23 00:01:45.960 --> 00:01:49.680 Much of this central plan is absorbed into our daily lives in ways that we don't notice 24 00:01:49.680 --> 00:01:51.720 or aren't aware of. 25 00:01:51.720 --> 00:01:55.300 This is supplemented by an additional layer of state and local regulations that have been 26 00:01:55.300 --> 00:02:00.160 pushed on these governments by higher government, or that grew up from within to adapt the central 27 00:02:00.160 --> 00:02:05.680 planning ethos to the particular circumstances of place and time. 28 00:02:05.680 --> 00:02:12.240 The effect is the same – life amidst an impossibly tangled legal thicket that grows 29 00:02:12.240 --> 00:02:16.900 more elaborate and complex by the day. 30 00:02:16.900 --> 00:02:23.980 State defies human comprehension, but it is not without human effect. 31 00:02:23.980 --> 00:02:29.900 Every aspect of our lives is subjected to it, from birth to death. 32 00:02:29.900 --> 00:02:34.740 Every product we buy, every service we use, every decision we make is filtered through 33 00:02:34.740 --> 00:02:38.060 this morass. 34 00:02:38.060 --> 00:02:41.700 You can try this on your own by going to the online search engine and typing in anything 35 00:02:41.700 --> 00:02:46.760 from chicken stock to funerals and observe the state at work, managing the whole of life 36 00:02:46.760 --> 00:02:51.400 Life as we know it in the most minute detail one can imagine. 37 00:02:51.400 --> 00:02:58.080 Think of anything and search it, and then see if you think we enjoy free enterprise. 38 00:02:58.080 --> 00:03:02.160 Just yesterday, I decided to look up the federal laws that govern the production and distribution 39 00:03:02.160 --> 00:03:07.520 of beer, wine and spirits, which, thanks to the internet, I can do without access to a 40 00:03:07.520 --> 00:03:09.520 law library. 41 00:03:09.520 --> 00:03:15.960 I immediately found myself swirling in an incredible maze of dictates and demands, covering 42 00:03:15.960 --> 00:03:20.360 who can produce and under what conditions how they must sell and to whom, what taxes 43 00:03:20.360 --> 00:03:24.280 apply and when, what warnings must be affixed to every product and even the shape of the 44 00:03:24.280 --> 00:03:28.160 bottles that can be exported and imported. 45 00:03:28.160 --> 00:03:32.680 Even if I had a month to do it, there was no way that I could read all that, much less 46 00:03:32.680 --> 00:03:35.140 understand it all. 47 00:03:35.140 --> 00:03:38.480 Of course, this is just the beginning. 48 00:03:38.480 --> 00:03:43.040 We are told when our kids should start school, when they are to learn to read and write, 49 00:03:43.040 --> 00:03:46.840 When they are to graduate from high school and under what conditions, at what point we 50 00:03:46.840 --> 00:03:51.840 can go to work and what we can be paid, what kinds of jobs we can accept and what we can 51 00:03:51.840 --> 00:03:54.120 be asked to do at them. 52 00:03:54.120 --> 00:03:57.900 Our speech at the office is controlled, as are the words that we can speak in any public 53 00:03:57.900 --> 00:04:00.760 setting such as radio and television. 54 00:04:00.760 --> 00:04:04.220 Every one of our home appliances is heavily regulated, mostly with the goal of making 55 00:04:04.220 --> 00:04:08.960 them perform more poorly than manufacturers would otherwise have them perform. 56 00:04:08.960 --> 00:04:12.660 How our mattresses are made, where we can purchase them from, what materials they have 57 00:04:12.660 --> 00:04:17.760 in them and how they are labelled are regulated to the nth degree. 58 00:04:17.760 --> 00:04:22.660 So it is with all our groceries, our trash pick-up, our water use in our home, and how 59 00:04:22.660 --> 00:04:28.860 all things that are involved in each of these is constructed, distributed and used. 60 00:04:28.860 --> 00:04:32.700 Our work lives are governed in great detail – coffee breaks, lunch breaks, hours per 61 00:04:32.700 --> 00:04:37.540 week and the things we are allowed to think and say about others. 62 00:04:37.540 --> 00:04:44.300 Finally, every aspect of life is touched in some way by this enormous apparatus. 63 00:04:44.300 --> 00:04:48.580 In the world of computer code, legacy code that is no longer useful and ends up only 64 00:04:48.580 --> 00:04:53.500 making the program work more slowly is called cruft. 65 00:04:53.500 --> 00:04:58.340 All coders know that they must first get rid of the cruft if they are going to create clean 66 00:04:58.340 --> 00:05:01.660 and efficient code going forward. 67 00:05:01.660 --> 00:05:04.620 So it is with government regulations. 68 00:05:04.620 --> 00:05:10.360 They choke off the functioning of society in its biggest and smallest parts. 69 00:05:10.360 --> 00:05:13.740 They prevent development in ways that we don't see. 70 00:05:13.740 --> 00:05:19.800 They are hugely costly, again, in ways we can't see, because, as Bastiat says, it is 71 00:05:19.800 --> 00:05:24.180 impossible to quantify the products and services we don't have or otherwise see the ways life 72 00:05:24.180 --> 00:05:29.100 would be different in the absence of such controls. 73 00:05:29.100 --> 00:05:35.040 Adding to the grim reality is the perverse irony that the whole of this code-cruft came 74 00:05:35.040 --> 00:05:40.900 about in an age when the whole of our lives were restricted by physical space and time. 75 00:05:40.900 --> 00:05:46.220 The world has changed, and today we rely heavily on digital information and products. 76 00:05:46.220 --> 00:05:50.500 These, however, are not well covered in the US Code. 77 00:05:50.500 --> 00:05:54.980 Sure enough, we wake every day to a digital world that is better than it was yesterday, 78 00:05:54.980 --> 00:06:00.660 with product improvements, lower prices and better accessibility, generally in service 79 00:06:00.660 --> 00:06:02.980 to humanity. 80 00:06:02.980 --> 00:06:09.940 As we look around the economic world, no sector better reflects the ideal than this one. 81 00:06:09.940 --> 00:06:15.880 It is not a coincidence that this is currently the least regulated part of life. 82 00:06:15.880 --> 00:06:20.740 The digital world is the frontier, the place of freedom, where innovations are freely 83 00:06:20.740 --> 00:06:26.300 Expected service to the consumer, not bureaucrats, is the driving force, and competing for who 84 00:06:26.300 --> 00:06:31.380 is best at providing that service is the test of success or failure. 85 00:06:31.380 --> 00:06:35.620 This digital world gives us a window into how life would be in the absence of the state 86 00:06:35.620 --> 00:06:38.380 in the physical world. 87 00:06:38.380 --> 00:06:43.280 This is one reason that the world of digits is so much more pleasing and useful to people 88 00:06:43.280 --> 00:06:45.540 than the physical world. 89 00:06:45.540 --> 00:06:51.500 The physical world is gummed up by this anachronism we call the state and its vast central planning 90 00:06:51.500 --> 00:06:53.180 apparatus. 91 00:06:53.180 --> 00:06:57.820 The digital world, for now, is not. 92 00:06:57.820 --> 00:07:01.900 One feature is that boundaries of the nation-state tend to evaporate. 93 00:07:01.900 --> 00:07:06.500 We deal with people and associate with people as individuals, potentially with all seven 94 00:07:06.500 --> 00:07:12.100 billion individuals, regardless of their locale or political identities, which is all that 95 00:07:12.100 --> 00:07:16.500 being from or living in a particular country really amounts to. 96 00:07:16.500 --> 00:07:21.020 Nonetheless, we must live a large part of our lives in the physical world, making real 97 00:07:21.020 --> 00:07:25.820 decisions day by day that affect the quality of our lives. 98 00:07:25.820 --> 00:07:29.460 That means that we must find the workaround. 99 00:07:29.460 --> 00:07:35.180 We must see through the fog created by the state and find what is best for us. 100 00:07:35.180 --> 00:07:38.140 This is not always easy to do. 101 00:07:38.140 --> 00:07:43.360 It means going against the grain that the state has grown up around us. 102 00:07:43.360 --> 00:07:46.840 For example, it might mean that we should find a way to homeschool rather than send 103 00:07:46.840 --> 00:07:49.040 the kids to public school. 104 00:07:49.040 --> 00:07:52.840 We have to hunt for loopholes in the law that permit us to do that. 105 00:07:52.840 --> 00:07:56.660 It might mean going to extra effort to hack our home appliances such as our water heaters 106 00:07:56.660 --> 00:07:59.100 or shower heads or toilets. 107 00:07:59.100 --> 00:08:03.120 It might mean that we eschew normal employment for self-employment or dare to move to some 108 00:08:03.120 --> 00:08:06.880 remote country where our job prospects are better. 109 00:08:06.880 --> 00:08:10.920 It might mean rejecting welfare, refusing to retire when the government tells us to, or 110 00:08:10.920 --> 00:08:14.360 embracing a faith that is out of the mainstream. 111 00:08:14.360 --> 00:08:18.200 In doing these things, we risk being called names or looked at as strange by others who 112 00:08:18.200 --> 00:08:25.040 just assume that the only way not to be strange is to comply with the plan. 113 00:08:25.040 --> 00:08:30.280 We need to read books that are not on the approved list, explore forms of art that are 114 00:08:30.280 --> 00:08:36.400 not blessed by our masters, and otherwise smash the model that has been given to us. 115 00:08:36.400 --> 00:08:47.760 In fact, I would suggest that every truly successful person, successful in ways that 116 00:08:47.760 --> 00:08:52.220 deserve respect, has done this in one form or another. 117 00:08:52.220 --> 00:08:56.640 They have lived their lives outside of the plan. 118 00:08:56.640 --> 00:08:59.880 What usually happens is that only after making their own way in the world, they confront 119 00:08:59.880 --> 00:09:03.940 the rude discovery that they have upset the powers that be. 120 00:09:03.940 --> 00:09:10.980 The lawsuits pour in, the congressional hearings start, the media frenzies appear and so on. 121 00:09:10.980 --> 00:09:15.140 Eventually the person figures out how to make his thing work within the prevailing plan, 122 00:09:15.140 --> 00:09:21.940 meanwhile someone else is rising through the ranks, someone who cares nothing for the plan. 123 00:09:21.940 --> 00:09:25.100 This is something we can all do. 124 00:09:25.100 --> 00:09:31.820 It can start at a young age, it can continue all through life, but the first step is to 125 00:09:31.820 --> 00:09:35.000 to see the plan for what it is. 126 00:09:35.000 --> 00:09:39.820 The plan not only violates our liberty and contradicts the whole theory of freedom, which 127 00:09:39.820 --> 00:09:45.000 is that society can manage itself without government controls, but it causes ossification 128 00:09:45.000 --> 00:09:48.100 of the social order and our personal lives. 129 00:09:48.100 --> 00:09:51.220 There is no predetermined way to get around it. 130 00:09:51.220 --> 00:09:57.000 That requires creativity, plus lots of trial and error. 131 00:09:57.000 --> 00:10:04.600 The question presents itself, if enough people reject the plan, does the plan still exist? 132 00:10:04.600 --> 00:10:09.340 It will always exist on the library shelves and in the search engine for the US code, 133 00:10:09.340 --> 00:10:16.240 but in our own choices and in our own ways, we can all make a contribution to making the 134 00:10:16.240 --> 00:10:20.800 plan less relevant for the functioning of our lives.