If the members of a society are fully ‘good’, then there is no need for law.

It is a simple, if humanly unobtainable premise; however, unreachable, it will serve as general groundwork for this essay, which is to say in part that eventually all (current) systems and models of “law” will eventually degenerate.

Interestingly, while searching for definitions, I came upon a factoid: in the mid 1750’s, a French economist, Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay’ wrote about his government:

“We have an illness in France which bids fair to play havoc with us; this illness is called bureaumania.” He and his mentor were the ones to come up with the word bureaucracy as a lamentation. ‘Bureau’ = desk, ‘cracy’ = power. Or inferred: ‘rule from behind a desk’. Though there are many neutral definitions out there of ‘bureaucracy’, from it just being ‘the government’ itself to ‘unelected officials in a system of government’. Those neutral definitions came second and had become so synonymous with one's own government that, when a government is thought of neutrally, its negative synonym is also invoked.

We need to go back farther than the creation of the word bureaucracy in the 1750’s – much farther. In the decline of Ancient Sparta near 400 B.C two thousand years prior, the state’s decline was absolutely assured. To begin, Sparta was certainly far less than half of what we know as ancient Greece, and even if it had billions of acres of land (it didn't), its land was still finite. When a Spartan boy came of age, he eventually inherited land and slaves through his father, but unlike many other ancient nations, so did the wives and daughters, except that the daughters didn’t die in war like the sons. If you did not inherit an estate and use it to contribute to the Spartan system, you were not a Spartan.

There were many more factors in the decline, but this alone is all I need to support the corner of this argument: that through how inheritance worked, the land and wealth of Sparta was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and eventually even kings would approach the Heiresses and the few ultra-rich for loans and food. When the kings wanted to reform Spartan culture and law, the ultra-rich would flood the senate with money to make votes impossible. Eventually, Sparta could not field any army at all, and it was a slow death over hundreds of years because conservatism and the rule of law won out over the future of Sparta. Sparta’s own laws and own wealthy elite killed it.

You could peg that to greed or gluttony or sloth or literally any other sin, but, how easy is it to witness and recognize sin over the course of eight-hundred years? Maybe when it was inevitable near the end, but by then, when it looks like the river is going to dry up, it will be fished to the last fish for fear of a future starvation.

Looking at the law today and a few simple arguments:

If a good man and a bad man both find money on the ground, the good man would turn it in, while the bad man would take it. There is the possibility that the bad man will be caught, but also the likelihood that he will not. Any other crime follows this same logic: there is a chance that a bad guy will be caught, and a chance he will not. I would wager that probability changes based on the criminal's experience, cleverness, and access to local aid (gangs, etc.). This creates a distinct separation of wealth between the most clever criminal and a good man (i.e., a successful armored-car robbery or fraud; consider Epstein's Tower’s financial fraud, amounting to $460 million, unrecovered and unadjusted in 1990s dollars).

Where an ethical man would follow the law, a criminal would not when it is financially suitable, or otherwise suitable to remain out of prison. Thus, the law is a burden to only those who regard it, or only a burden to those who are not educated enough, or who cannot afford good lawyers. Why are high-priced lawyers high-priced? Because they are good at either marketing themselves or are good in court. Thus, the difference in representation between what an accomplished criminal or a good or ethical man has access to is weighted differently.

With these arguments, it could be argued that I have logically paved the way for the birth or existence of an ultra-rich, criminal elite who is above the law – oh no, wait, Epstein's island existed, and the U.S. government has not prosecuted a single person beyond Epstein and Maxwell. This is not an Epstein article, though, that was just easy proof.

So, you will only have an ever-growing demographic of rich criminals over the course of centuries who don't just love the current criminal and law code (it is they who found ways to abuse it), but also other, more regular and ethical ultra-rich families who have also gotten wealthy and keep getting wealthier on that same system, keeping the system conservative. (Sparta: a system where wealth, land, and power concentrate over generations, and a system where the Senate is allowed to be influenced by money). An additional American addendum: ‘conservative’ in that sense does not mean politically right. It means historically stagnant, i.e., without vision or care for the health of your nation, and without meaningful reform to account for changing technology, and morality will always (and it has always) led to the death of all Empires.

This is not a praise of any such ideological (or ideoligion) thing, such as communism or capitalism, but rather an observation that: A: all law and monetary systems will be (generally) followed by the ethical/good, while those same systems will be ignored (at leisure) by the bad. B: The most clever and the most bad will rise and be able to afford good lawyers, which can and do continue to aid them in circumventing capture/rebuttal. C: Smart criminals who have learned to hide well or abuse the system will align themselves with the protectors of the system or law, which is also aligning themselves with ultra-rich families/dynasties who continue to exist and prosper with the current system.

The inability to purge a system (Sparta) of its weaknesses, such as the aforementioned, as well as a system adding more and more laws which require evermore specialized lawyers (or education), only adds even more expense as a burden to the good or ethical man, leads a system into a slow death. Both the consolidation of wealth by a few ethical men and clever criminals alike, and the expansion of bureaucracy, along with their desire to maintain the system, have led me to term it the ‘Corruption of Lawfulness’.

Corruption is allowed to exist not because of its protectors, but because, at its core, lawfulness is a system of rules and ethics rather than a system of morality. In a perfect, ideological argument, it could be said that “good and moral men need no laws; laws are for the men who have forgotten how to be good.”

This was a fun essay. 

(Legal note: I do not condone criminal activity. Ahahaha! I try to be a moral man.)

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to him to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.

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