From the Easy Chair

Humanistic Law

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 156-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DC196

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DC196, Humanistic Law, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 306, January 17, 1994.

Douglas Murray, Otto Scott, Mark Rushdoony and I will now discuss humanistic law.

We have a problem in the western world and I think Khadafy called attention to it very, very tellingly, perhaps 15 years ago or 13 years ago when he warned the western nations that they were creating a world catastrophe. He sent them a Christmas message in which he urged them to go back to Jesus Christ. He said law cannot long endure unless it has a supernatural foundation, a supernatural source. And what the western world had done by abandoning Jesus Christ was to erode all source of law and morality. And the whole world was being infected by the growing collapse that western society represented.

Of course he received no response to his Christmas message to the western states, but the crisis has not gone away because they paid no attention to him. It has, indeed, gotten much worse.

Someone has observed that any civil government is finished when people no longer feel safe on the streets. At that point the basic function of that government, as far as the average person is concerned, to keep them secure and their lives and properties, is no longer tenable. It is no longer being exercised. And you have a revolutionary temper, unfortunately. And the people are ready to turn against the state. They turn against it in 101 ways. They show their contempt by it. Its leaders become the subject of contempt and of humor. The laws are broken at will because the states’ laws are not comparable to God’s. Who respects what a group of politicians have produced?

So we have a crisis. Humanistic law very quickly looses its validity because it has behind it only the will of the state. On top of that it changes so, so that there is no constancy, no principle, no premise that keeps governing it year in and year out. You do not know what the law is going to say. You give up trying to know and Douglas Murray has pointed out that there are over 3000 new laws in California each year. Add as many or more by Congress passed annually. Add to that tens of thousands of bureaucratic regulations which are enforced through bureaucratic courts. And you see how respect for the law has ceased to exist. The law is so extensive that no one can know it nor respect it.

With that, Douglas, would you like to carry on?

[ Murray ] Well, the... it is having a lot of effects on our society. It is altering people’s behavior. People used to go into the cities to shop because there was more selection and ... and so forth. People find themselves now avoiding going to major cities even though there are discount outlets there and so forth and even the... the major merchandising outlets are putting in stores out of the city areas. They are going to where the people are, realizing that people don't want to travel into the city anymore. So you have a decentralization of economic activity. Mail order shopping has become very big simply because people want to avoid the potential for violent crime in the city. And now the latest thing is television shopping.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] People who shop by television. So people’s behavior is ... is... our whole society’s behavior is ... is changed by the ...the concern for their safety going into the cities. I don’t go to San Francisco ever. I won’t even go to Modesto or Stockton which are towns of maybe 100, 200,000 people, because the drive by shootings, the random crime has become pervasive.

So you simply have to live without the convenience of being able to shop at ... in major economic centers any longer. This is just one facet of... of how it has affected people’s lives. The... the ... the confusion caused by Humanistic law has become so multi layered that people are confused about what is legal and what isn’t legal. Even police officers now almost have to fly by the seat of their pants. When they go into a situation one fellow told me, one sheriff’s deputy told me recently that he responded to a report of somebody shooting near a residence. Now the law is you can’t shoot within 150 yards of a private residence or rather... I am sorry, 300 feet. But it was within about 140 feet. So the guy just winged it. I mean he just told the ... the guy who was doing the...

The guy who was shooting on his own property doing some target practice, but the noise of the... of the target shooting apparently was bothering a neighbor and so he... he told this fellow who as doing the shooting who was legally target practice on his own property safely doing it safely that that... that the law was 150 feet. So police officers now have gotten into the habit of, in effect, writing the law to cure the specific situation. They don’t bother to go back. Many of them carry a copy of what they call Dearing’s copy of the California penal code. And before they even get out and go in a house, sometimes they will review a particular section of the law that they have been called to respond to.

They don’t do that anymore, because there is no time. The calls are so fast and they are... they are going from one place to another as quickly as they can. They have to make it up on the spot. And... and they are just...even the lawyers in court now take advantage of the ignorance of the judge on the law and I have... and I ... I have heard attorneys say that when they go into court they just make it up. And the judge hasn’t got time because the pace of the cases are so fast that if it sounds right, they go along with it.

I mean the system is... is gotten totally broken down. I mean it has become absolutely insane.

[ Scott ] Well, I think the title you chose...

[ Rushdoony ] I didn’t choose it. It was suggested both titles.

[ Scott ] Well, humanistic law is a marvelous title because it summarizes in two words what is wrong with the law. The law in the western civilization has always been based on the fact that there is a higher law.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] If law is limited to man then anything goes. And that is where we are.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I recall talking to the chief legal counsel for Firestone rubber when Firestone rubber was big independent American company. That is in the 60s, early 60s. And we got, of course, since he is a lawyer we got on to the law and he said most people have the opinion that the law is a straight highway with a series of posts on it that this is right and this is wrong and so forth, but he said that is not true. He said the law is a process. And he said, “My task as the corporate counsel here is to see the direction that the court is taking and to lead the company into a pattern which fits that direction, because down the road the ruling along that line will come along.”

Well, if you have law that is that fluid, then you have reached the point that you are talking about, Doug, where it has now become a regular ocean ...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...and nobody really ... you can find a precedent for anything and you can find an argument for or against anything. And it seems to me from what I have been told, from what your experience, Rush, with the Constitution and the courts where you are not... you... you or your lawyer are not allowed to bring up the Constitution.

[ Rushdoony ] That is right.

[ Scott ] Here we have a constitution that the courts will not allow you to cite, because it carries the case beyond the regulations and the point in the case as I... as you told me, was whether or not the regulation was violated. That is all. Whether the regulation was constitutional was not ... or not is beside the point.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Well, then what... what do we have? Do we have a ... a system of law?

[ Rushdoony ] No. We certainly don’t. You have a system of regulations.

[ Scott ] That is... that comes right to the bone.

[ M Rushdoony ] I think that is why a lot of people think if the law is not something that protects them, then they think of the law as being their enemy. And if you ever need to use the law for your own benefit you won’t have to face the fact that it is going to cost your dearly. If the law is not available and if the courts are not available for simple justice to someone who has been robbed, you have to pay very dearly, dearly for justice and then it is... it is... it is a coin toss as to whether you are going to get justice, because the courts don’ts and for justice. They stand for the regulations.

[ Rushdoony ] I don’t know how many of you ever read what you said, Douglas, reminded me of it, a novel written, oh, around 1960 and I do not recall the author, but the name was Pioneer, Go Home. Any of you ever read that?

[ Scott ] No.

[ Rushdoony ] It was a classic, very, very funny. Dorothy and I laughed over that . We read it and we re read it. A film was made of the novel and believe Elvis Pressley played the young man in it. But I never saw the film, so I don’t know what it its quality is worth.

The gist of the story was that this southern family falls afoul of the law when their car breaks down and they decide to be squatters there on the south shore of the Chesapeake, I believe. And the police attempt to oust them and the old man, the grandfather, says, “Leave it to me.” And he quotes the regulation or a law on each occasion to the sheriff’s men and he says, “Why there his a statute. I don’t recall the exact date of it which said thus and so. And if you tamper what I am doing, you are running afoul of the law and you are really liable.”

And they would go back and ask the legal department to research it and sure enough there always something along those lines and the old grandfather kept saying, “You have got to understand they pass so many laws that you can just wing it, invent anything, pull it out of the air and they are going to find that somebody has passed that kind of law either on the state or the federal level.”

And that is the story from beginning to end, essentially, and it is hilarious, because here is someone who is exploiting the system and he is doing it knowing that it is jungle. So many rules, so many regulations, so many cases setting precedents, so many laws that if you know how to work the system, that is the thesis of the old man. They can’t touch you.

[ Murray ] I saw a beautiful example of that in a San Francisco court and I was on jury duty and this attorney had violated the right of way of a cable car in San Francisco and he hit the cable car. And basically he was in the wrong, but he had read in the law where a cable car is not subject to the motor vehicle laws and, therefore, cannot be considered a second party in a right of way dispute in an intersection because the law says it is a conveyance. It is not a motor vehicle. And the judge asked the clerk to look it up and he nodded. Yes, that is right. And the judge says, “Case dismissed.” He says, “I hope you pay yourself a good fee.” And this was the attorney representing himself.

[ Scott ] Well, talking about attorneys and their fees, I have forgotten which case it is which is now a matter of a big case in which the attorney’s fees are 400 dollars an hour and that is considerable jump up from 150 an hour which was standard last time I checked for the average attorney.

[ Murray ] What are they for corporate clients?

[ Scott ] Four hundred, 500 dollars an hour and bills of several million dollars are customary when a large corporation is involved which is one of the reasons that they try to settle out of court and as quickly as possible because the lawyers cost more than the claimants.

We are just entering into a new phase in corporate law on the disabilities act. The disabilities act means that if a person weighs 800 pounds you have to hire them notwithstanding and if they have various and grave disabilities they are supposed to be hired equal with anyone at any other applicant.

[ Murray ] You understand an 800 pound trapeze artist.

[ Scott ] No, but I am sure the... the one would apply.

[ Rushdoony ] Well Joanna had quite an experience some years ago when she was still working for the telephone company when this girl who was very, very much overweight was hired because they couldn’t really reject her since she had a disability. And she knew that was why she was hired so she would stay away from work on the least excuse. She could be abusive of the staff and her coworkers. She knew she had an immunity. They were afraid that because of her disability she could cost them a great deal, so she did as she pleased, worked as she pleased and created a very serious problem there so that her coworkers were relieved when she chose to stay away. Things went better at work.

[ Scott ] What does the disability act... how does that fit in in a society which still talks about being a meritocracy, about the fact that people have a right to be promoted if they are female and have two college degrees.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And... and claim a competence which is just assumed rather than proven?

[ Murray ] Well, it is only merit for the chosen group. I mean they... the government defines who is merit...

[ Scott ] Who is meritorious.

[ Murray ] Merit... who is meritorious and who isn’t.

[ Scott ] But, you see, the... we are involved now in so many contradictions.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] What was that Sam Irvin, a guy at the ... who was on the...

[ Scott ] Watergate committee.

[ Murray ] Watergate committee. He cited a poem the... the web that we weave.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes. That was Puck from Shakespeare. Oh, what a tangled web weave when we seek to deceive or something like that.

[ Rushdoony ] ...when first we practice to deceive.

[ Scott ] That is it.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] Well, Sam Irvin was a very interesting character. He was the only one on the Watergate committee that my friend in the oil company hadn't given money to. So I said, “Are you telling me that Sam is an honest Senator?”

He said, “Well, not exactly,” because Sam never spent any money in his home state. His suits, his hotel rooms, his meals, his automobiles, all his expenses were always covered.

[ Rushdoony ] I recall—and I think this is fundamental to the problem we have—when I was young and this one boy was going into an area where the signs and everything made clear he had no right to be and somebody else told him, “You can’t go there. Look at the sign. You are not supposed to be there.” And he said, “Why shouldn’t I? He is not God,” speaking of the man who put up the sign.

Well, that is why humanistic law doesn’t work. You remove the sanction of God. You have no authority, then, that long endures in its ability to say, “Thou shalt not do so and so.” And that is why Khadafy was so perceptive. We destroyed the foundations of law in the western world. And at the time he predicted, I believe, it was in the mid 70s to be more specific, that it would lead to a further breakdown throughout the western world and certainly that is happening so that there are some who do not feel that a society in which there is no respect for law because nobody regards law as truly binding.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] It is going to disintegrate.

[ Scott ] Do you... going back to Candor that little publication. I read it this afternoon and I don't usually because it is often.. it doesn't seem to be worth it, but this time it had a reprint of an essay printed, of course, a long time ago by G. K. Chesterton. And Chesterton was talking about the family in this essay. And he said... now Chesterton died n 1936. I think he was born in the 1874 or somewhere around there. So we are talking about a man who is ... most of his writings were, I think, from 1900 to 1925 or 30, 1936. He said, first of all, the idea of liberty by the young people is mostly an illusion because their liberties consist of behaving in unison one way or another. And when in his time they bobbed their hair and they went into dancing the Charleston and driving fast cars and so forth and they thought of that as liberty. But they were all doing this together. What it really was was fashion. They were joining the fashion of he time, rock and roll today and so forth.

He said... and then he moved in the essay to the question of authority and what you might call right and wrong. He said, “Actually, the family is the place where you learn what is right and what is wrong and you learn the nature of authority, because each of these families is a little kingdom with a king and a queen and subjects in the form of small children.” And he said, “When you get out into the... as soon as you leave the family, as soon as you leave the house, you enter into the world of rules.”

And he said, “You are covered with those rules the minute you get out in the street and the minute you go to work because you are working for an organization which is operated like a total monarchy or a dictatorship and when you drive a car, when you get into a street car, no matter what you do, you are covered...” The family then is the place of retreat from all the rules of society. And there you learn the rules of the family. You learn why you should obey the rule outside the family. And he said those who want to destroy authority within the family do not realize what is going to emerge from the house in the future. And I think that was a very insightful progression.

[ Rushdoony ] Very much so. Well, humanistic law is by the courts progressively replacing every element of God’s law in the western world. It is a systematic campaign to supplant God’s law with man’s law. And what you have is a vast realm of rules and regulations which create an opportunity for evasion by legal means. The crime has to be specifically covered by a statute. And we are losing both on the ability to enforce the law and on the ability to make the law relevant to society. Relevance is important to law. And humanistic law lacks that key character, relevance. It is created in terms of ideas that the law makers have about the perfect society, a humanistic idea of a great society or whatever they choose to call it in which there should be endless regulations.

I think it is interesting that the grand model for all socialist orders Plato’s Republic has no laws, only the philosopher kings who issue rules and regulations ad hoc.

When Plato was old, dealing with a practical situation, he wrote the laws. But until then he preferred to have a group of men ad hoc establishing the rules. The basic premise in this country was government of laws, not of men. By the end of that... of the last century Charles Ferguson one of the most influential of writers in American history, although now forgotten, had written against that thesis saying we needed a government of men, not of laws, because he broke radically with the Christian tradition even though he had a ministerial background to believe in the goodness of man and to believe that the philosopher kings could best rule without a constitution or a body of laws and only out of their goodness of heart and their wisdom. And we are living today in Ferguson’s world.

William Randolph Hearts was a great promoter of Ferguson in his early years. So a government of men, not of laws is what we really have, although we are not honest as Ferguson was to state what the fact is.

In dealing with the subject of humanistic law, we have to recognize another factor that is especially important here. With the rise of humanistic law, you have an element coming in to power that has always been there, but never dominating the scene, the professional politician, the manipulator, the person who behind the scenes constantly works and uses law to his own advantage. And humanistic law has given us the kind of senators and congressmen, state legislators, mayors, et cetera, that we have in abundance today, breed that is totally unprincipled, operates using the law to manipulate the people.

Gross has written more than one book about this type of person and they are totally pragmatic and unprincipled position.

[ Scott ] I would like to bring in the judges.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The judiciary operates in a shadow in the United States. It is protected by the press. Constantly we read about a court has ruled without giving us the name of the judge.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And without giving us any of the details of the case in which the ruling was made excepting the most cursory mention. And we have here a multiplicity of judges and courtrooms. We have 50 different systems of administration... judicial administration in the states and we have, of course, the federal courts and the federal judges. And where constitutional rulings used to be rarely made, they are now being made by district judges which is the lowest level, first... first level of the federal judiciary. There is nobody monitoring he courts. You mentioned earlier that, Doug, that the courts legislate. The courts only legislate when Congress wants them to. When Congress doesn’t want to openly legislate a certain result, it presses the judiciary into making that decision which, in effect, legislates, because the court, the Supreme Court of the United States is the creature of the American Congress. It is not independent. The judiciary is less independent today than it has ever been. It falls into the tide of every fashion, every fallacy, every myth. And it rules in every which way. And even on the federal appeal level, the ruling in one area of the court of appeals does not affect other areas of the court of appeals so that the court rulings are chaotic until they get to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court only accepts a very small percentage of the cases that go that far, so that what the appeal courts have ruled is taken as law.

Now at no time, no previous period of American history have the rulings of the courts been taken as law. They are only rulings of the case. It is Talmudic in a way. The scholars who created the Talmud over the centuries have taken every possible aspect of the Old Testament and ruled about its application in action life. And their rulings are wildly diverse because each case is distinct and unique. And if you go by case law, that means that you can bring the case up again because every case has a different situation and background and different participants so that you can rule any way you want.

But what really gets me is the secrecy which has been created around the administration of the courts in the United States. They are having more influence today than ever and yet they are not covered by the press in any really clear way. The people don’t even know who is in the courts, don’t know who the judges are. They don’t know where they come from. You don’t get any biographical information. You may have rulings that are dominated by racial or religious prejudice which is never mentioned, which is never brought up. The caliber of the courts... and, incidentally, the judges do not discipline one another. A judge can be overturned and overturned and overturned for imbecilic decisions, but he remains in office, because the courts do not discipline their fellow members. Any time that anyone proceeds against a judge, it is from the outside of the judiciary. Never from within. And I think this... this is one of the great failures of the American press and the American academy. We are up against a group of men with... who are using, in effect, unlimited authority a la a sultan, Middle Eastern rulings, bizarre rulings. I just ruled where a female judge gave a very moderate, very lenient sentence to a man convicted of sodomizing his child, his step daughter for a period of years on the basis of the fact that he had not penetrated her vaginally and therefore respected his religion. He was a Muslim.

This was by a female judge and it said no more about the case, just, you know, a little parting of the curtain. And it is... a...a continuing disgrace in the American system.

Well, we were talking about crime an hour ago. We didn’t get to the judges and just as well because you might have just dissolved in... in... in mutual rage.

[ Murray ] Well, it is sweetheart deal. When the congress doesn't... when politicians don’t want to take the heat and they want to make some big change, for instance, I don’t think that the Congress could have passed a law legalizing abortion. So they threw it in the laps of the court, because...

[ Scott ] Yes...

[ Murray ] ... because, you know, these are unelected ...

[ Scott ] That is right. And untouchable.

[ Murray ] And untouchable.

[ Scott ] Federal court.

[ Murray ] And in ... in office and once they go totally crazy. You know, our government refuse to rule by results and I think that is the most frustrating thing to people because it is so illogical.

[ Scott ] That is true.

[ Murray ] You know, God’s law has lasting effective results. If you commit a murder and you are executed for it, you are not ever going to do that crime again.

[ Scott ] That is right.

[ Murray ] If... if ... if a child is molested or abused for monetary purposes and pornography there is a biblical prescription of death. So he is not ever going to do that again and you have all of these people, particularly people in the poly class abduction and killing who are confused and they are the ones that are running up to Sacramento and saying, “You have got to do something about these repetitive offenders.”

Now the prescription for dealing with repetitive offenders was written a long time ago, but they won’t do it.

[ Scott ] The people used to do it in the... in the West before the courts and the judges and the sheriffs arrived. If they found somebody in the mining camp who was a thief they hanged him. And somebody who was a trouble maker very soon found all he was looking for and a book I read recently about crime in the West is that it arrived with the authorities who made deals with the crooks. It was one sheriff who refused to pass a judgment upon a criminal. They took the criminal out and they hanged him and they left a noose on the judge’s desk and the judge left town the next day. He caught the message.

Now there doesn’t seem to be any way that we can even reach our courts because we don’t know who is a good judge and who is a bad one and there is nobody to handle the matter. Can you imagine a case that takes years in the courts and more years to go through the baffle of appeals and we know that the Supreme Court of the United States has openly and deliberately and consciously released murders on technicalities. And yet we don’t know which judges voted which way. And we don’t know every much about the backgrounds of the judges, not even the Supreme court judges.

[ Rushdoony ] We have been discussing various aspects of humanistic law but there is an important one that I think we should also take into consideration. Earlier in this country the law was God’s law. There was almost no statute law. And it was a case of the judge interpreting what God had to say and the jury also because the cases were decided out of the Bible.

Now what has happened since is that in the ... we have, in effect, an unwritten Bible, psychiatry and psychology so that the key testimony, very often in many a case is that of psychiatrists and psychologists. And they can be found on both sides of the case and their view of crime is a radically humanistic one.

I mentioned earlier the very amusing novel Pioneer, Go Home. There is a scene in the book in which a social worker deals the one way to get the old man is to declare him to be unfit to have custody of his two grandchildren. So the case goes to court and the psychiatric social worker wants to put it on a scientific basis. Let’s test this old man. Your honor, you will see what he is.

So the judge asks of the test and says the court will adjourn while it is administered by a court clerk. So then when they are in session again the psychiatric social worker analyzes the answers to the questions and the judge keeps saying, “I ... I don’t see what is unreasonable about that.” And the social worker calls attention to this or that aspect that this person is dangerous, unfit, to be around children and so on and so forth. And concludes with the statement that such a person at the very least should be separated from children if not put away.

And the judge says, “Well, that is an interesting conclusion,” and rules in favor of the old man, the grandfather. And the social worker is very indignant and the judge lets her have it. He said, “It was I who took the test. I wanted to test your methodology.”

It is a hilarious indictment of the whole thing. The only trouble is there are no judges like that would do that. But what the novelist there did show very tellingly was how radically subjective such testing is.

[ Scott ] Social science is entirely subjective. The Weimar Republic used to have elevated psychiatry to a position equal with the judge and they called... they didn’t call it punishment. They called it treatment and the treatment was based on the psychiatric evaluation. Now I don’t know whether they went into contending psychiatric evaluations or not, but here no criminal, I thin, is sentenced without a psychiatric evaluation or at least a psychological evaluation. And it is interesting, because they don't examine them physically. They don’t have to have a physical examination. They can only... they only have to have a... you might say a cultural examination. I wouldn’t call it mental. It is more cultural than anything else, sociological if you prefer. And yet they may be suffering from a tumor or... or all kinds of things. And I think it is an indication of how far we have gone away from the physical realities that we don't examine them physically.

[ Rushdoony ] Incidentally back in the summer of 1962 at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, where there was a summer teaching session Hans Senholz was one of them and someone else who was a very, very incompetent professor of political science. And one of the things I did was to require all the students to read Pioneer, Go Home which startled them that they had to read a novel.

But they all got a great deal out of it and about two or three years ago one of the students at that session told me he still thought back with pleasure to the reading of Pioneer, Go Home because he found it such a humorous indictment of our regulatory state. But the reality, of course, is growing more and more grim all around us. The regulations can be absurd, but they are maintained with a straight face or when they are totally in competent they are quietly replaced without an apology. I recall during World War II when I was on the Indian reservation in northeast Nevada a federal regulation from Washington with regard to steers forbidding the ranchers to sell all their steers each year because some should be kept back for breeding purposes.

[ Scott ] Steers?

[ Rushdoony ] Steers yes.

[ Scott ] That is really steering in the wrong direction.

[ Rushdoony ] Steers, in case anyone listening is so much a city product that they don’t know are castrated bulls. They are only for eating, not for breeding. But that type of nonsense is very, very common place only we don’t have people calling attention to it nowadays and laughing about it. It has gone past humor.

[ Scott ] It really has. Bizarre rulings.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And very dangerous.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now governments that have outlived their competence in terms of justice are doomed to fall. In the old days it was the predilection to rule to exempt aristocrats from proper punishments. Now there are a number of categories that are exempted from proper punishment, Social scientists themselves who commit a great many moral crimes against the people are ... are allowed to do so for cultural reasons.

I mean, perjury, for instance, is now accepted. Perjurer is now used as a witness against a defendant or a witness in civil cases as well as in criminal cases. You can prove that they have in the past lied and it will not affect a judge. If the story fits the judges prejudices and the jury’s, it will be accepted.

[ Murray ] The judges are issuing warrants based on the ... the representations of convicted criminals. That is where some of these home invasion by law enforcement, you know, thinking that there is drugs in the house and it is just a misstatement or an intentional misstatement by a convicted criminal just to get them... buy himself some time or get himself off the hook.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the world of regulation is all around us and even when it is something that you have to say, ok, it is good, it still violates common sense and freedom to carry it to the extent that people do. For example, I have never smoked in my life. It never appealed to me. I never liked the smell of it, but I never made a stink about it with anybody and yet not only have we all this crazy anti smoking propaganda, but all the talk about secondary smoke killing you and killing so many 300 people a year, I believe, is the last figure I heard.

[ Scott ] Out of 260 million?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And how do they know anyway?

[ Scott ] They don’t.

[ Rushdoony ] But it has reached the level of insanity and what I find amusing is people I know who not too long ago before they saw the light and went down to the altar and foreswore smoking and now get very huffy if they are seated anywhere near somebody who is smoking.

[ Scott ] Well, it is almost like a reformed whore.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And sometimes I feel that what we ought to have is a statement with every piece of paper coming out of Washington, DC that reads: Warning, the United States government can be hazardous to your health.

[ Scott ] Indeed.

[ Rushdoony ] And I think that would be closer to the truth than much of what we hear from them.

[ Murray ] Well, it is the... it is the humanistic missionary zeal.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] You have always got to carry things too far.

[ Scott ] Well, one of the attributers or features of the Soviet Union in its hay day was the fact that individuals were constantly running into lecturers who would point their finger and tell them what they were doing wrong. And this is sort of endemic in the United States, too. A great many people fell awfully noble denouncing cigarettes. But I don’t hear the same lectures against cocaine and heroine or the same zeal.

[ Rushdoony ] And have you read... Something you said reminded of it. P. J. O’Rourke, Republican Party Reptile?

[ Scott ] I haven’t read that, no.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh. He has a hilarious section on a trip he took to Russia with a lot of true blue leftists. It was a trip advertized in Nation as an educational trip to the great experiment. So he took the trip. And all these people, of course, who believe that this was the great worker’s paradise nonetheless went along on the trip with a lot of toilet paper.

[ Scott ] So they knew.

[ Rushdoony ] So they knew the truth. And they were constantly lecturing not only O’Rourke, but even the Russians. So the Russians on the trip were ready to sneak off with O’Rourke to do nothing but drink and forget the leftists.

[ Scott ] If it wasn’t for cigarettes and whiskey I think the Soviet Union wouldn’t have lasted 70 years.

[ Rushdoony ] Vodka, not whiskey.

[ Scott ] Vodka, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, O’Rourke’s book is very, very funny.

[ Scott ] He is funny.

[ Rushdoony ] Our time is just about over. Is there something you would like to say by way of conclusion? I will say this. Humanistic law is committing suicide. It has no future. So that is the good news about humanistic law.

[ Murray ] Well, I... Otto, your landmark proposal years ago proposing term limits on law makers I would like to advance that to the next step and propose that we make it mandatory on law makers that they have to review all laws on the books for continued validity every year. So we give them... keep them busy. Give them something to do so they don’t write new ones.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Well, I will go along with that. I think that 12 years on the bench and 12 years in Congress, 12 years in government service is long enough. We should pension them. It would be cheap. Pension them for life and forbid them to serve again in any capacity except military. If they want to fight for the country, I am all for it.

[ Murray ] If they haven’t made themselves rich through graft and corruption in 12 years...

[ Scott ] Twelve is enough. That is right. Then they are not smart enough.

[ Murray ] They are really incompetent.

[ Scott ] Then they are not smart enough...

[ Murray ] Right.

[ Scott ] ... to serve any longer.

[ Murray ] Exactly.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you.

[ Voice ] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.