John Singleton with Bob HowardRip Van Australia (Stanmore: Cassell Australia, 1977), pp. 152-53, under the heading “Law”.

What a young law student needs most after a diploma and a shingle and a client are good pair of eyebrows and broad shoulders. Then, when his client asks him how to stay out of trouble with the government, he can raise the first and shrug the second. ~ LOWEL MASON, F.T.C. COMMISSIONER U.S.A., 1950

Ever since society has existed, disappointment has been preaching “Put not your faith in legislation”: and yet the trust in legislation seems hardly diminished. ~ HERBERT SPENCER

The most that a government should do is protect individual rights. Any action that violates individual rights is a crime. The only laws we need, are those that are necessary to protect individual rights.

In this sense, the law should be purely negative — it should specify only those few things that we should not do. It should do nothing in the positive sense of regulating voluntary human activity. Thus, such actions as murder, robbery, assault, rape and fraud violate rights and are therefore immoral. They should be “Against the Law”. But such activities as prostitution, gambling, drug-taking, practising medicine without a licence, selling beer after “closing time” and baking bread out of hours, do not violate rights, are not immoral and should, therefore, be “within the law”.

It should also be noted that many areas currently covered by “the law”, would, in a free society, still be covered by the law, but via the form of the contract.

The fundamental legal principle of the administration of the law, should be that of assuming a person innocent until proven guilty. To an alarming extent, laws are today being predicated upon the opposite premise of guilty until proven innocent. All victimless “crime” and purely regulatory laws fall into this category. This tendency is very much advanced, and should be a matter for urgent and serious consideration by all people in the legal profession and any associated professions.

Our governments, via the legal professions, have embarked on the hopeless task of trying to bottle humankind up — of trying to fit humans into a prescribed mould. The history of taxation laws is a glowing tribute to the ingenuity of mankind — no matter how they are constructed, altered or twisted, loopholes are always found. New revisions and extensions are made to cover these, but still more loopholes are found. This process takes place in most areas of the law, and the end result is a body of law so massive, so complicated and so restrictive that it is almost completely self-defeating. Thus modern governments manufacture more crimes than they prevent. In fact, they also commit more crimes than they prevent.

The political area of human activity, with its end product of legislation, is slowly overwhelming the other two areas of human activity — the economic and the social. Both our material and psychological welfare are suffering because of the restrictions placed on us by over-ambitious, over-zealous and plain straight out mistaken government legislative activity. Only a reversion to freedom will prevent a complete economic and spiritual breakdown of our society. The law must be used for its proper function — to protect individual rights. Not to slowly strangle and smother all voluntary human activity. There ought to be a law against it — a great big law called non-interference.