Ayn Rand nailed it when she wrote that non-objective laws form the basis of slavery and dictatorship.
That’s exactly what our newly installed totalitarian rulers are doing. Lockdowns, for example, are imposed indefinitely with no objective criteria whatsoever for ending them — other than when the tyrant/Governor/President feels like it.
Since non-objective law has worked so well, in terms of compliance, they’re now getting ready to impose it with “domestic terrorism” legislation and executive edicts. What’s the definition of “domestic terrorism”? “Extremism”, they say. What’s the concrete, objective definition of “extremism”? They won’t tell us. But Obama’s former CIA director, John Brennan, as well as AOC and others have made it clear: conservatism, libertarianism, and any other viewpoint they don’t like are on the list.
Here are Rand’s comments on non-objective law, describing the situation in America of 2021 perfectly:
When men are caught in the trap of non-objective law, when their work, future and livelihood are at the mercy of a bureaucrat’s whim, when they have no way of knowing what unknown “influence” will crack down on them for which unspecified offense, fear becomes their basic motive, if they remain in the industry at all—and compromise, conformity, staleness, dullness, the dismal grayness of the middle-of-the-road are all that can be expected of them. Independent thinking does not submit to bureaucratic edicts, originality does not follow “public policies,” integrity does not petition for a license, heroism is not fostered by fear, creative genius is not summoned forth at the point of a gun.
Non-objective law is the most effective weapon of human enslavement: its victims become its enforcers and enslave themselves.
…The retaliatory use of force requires objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it, as well as objective rules to define punishments and enforcement procedures. Men who attempt to prosecute crimes, without such rules, are a lynch mob. If a society left the retaliatory use of force in the hands of individual citizens, it would degenerate into mob rule, lynch law and an endless series of bloody private feuds or vendettas.
If physical force is to be barred from social relationships, men need an institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules.
This is the task of a government—of a proper government—its basic task, its only moral justification and the reason why men do need a government.
A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws.
… All laws must be objective (and objectively justifiable): men must know clearly, and in advance of taking an action, what the law forbids them to do (and why), what constitutes a crime and what penalty they will incur if they commit it.
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