How the Protection of Law Was Lost

Nota: a tendência agora é criar entidades reguladoras (de mercado de capitais, da banca, dos vinhos, da água, et.c) que criam legislação (que se intromete na propriedade privada e livre contrato), e ela própria interpreta e aplica sanções. Mesmo quando o sistema de justiça é chamado a intervir, devido à complexidade das acusações fica a Justiça nas mãos de conceitos vagos e indefinido por acusadores que procuram sempre o bem comum e atacar os monstros que procuram o lucro.

Um dos casos mais evidentes é o "Insiding Trading". Ser crime público o uso de uma informação para proveito próprio não lembra ao diabo. Quanto muito o assunto é do domínio civil e da auto-regulação dos mercados, a que os investidores acedem voluntariamente.

Como podemos nós, pobres humanos, senão usar a informação em proveito próprio? Deveremos nós, coagidos pelo Estado, a usar informação em proveito público? Ou deveremos nós guardar a informação e só usá-la até todo o planeta ser informado dessa informação e marcar uma data e hora a partir do qual todos ao mesmo tempo e igualmente vão tentar tirar partido dessa informação?


This paper was given at the Mt. Pelerin Society meeting in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on September 21, 2003.

Law, once a shield of the innocent, has become a weapon in the hands of government. Today anyone can be criminally prosecuted for offenses created by the indictment. What William Blackstone defined as law – "the Rights of Englishmen" – has been lost.

In the Anglo-American legal system, law consists of a few basic principles: due process, the attorney-client privilege, equality before the law, the right to confront adverse witnesses, and the prohibitions against crimes without intent, bills of attainder, self-incrimination, retroactive law, and attacks against a person through his property. Each of these protective principles has been breached.

The New Deal laid the groundwork for destroying the tort/crime distinction and using criminal sanctions to achieve public welfare goals. An important feature of New Deal legislation was congressional delegation of lawmaking power to regulatory agencies. Delegation combined statutory authority and enforcement authority in the same hands. The bureaucrats’ ability to define criminal offenses by their interpretation of the regulations that they write gives regulatory police vast discretion. (…) The bureaucrats’ ability to create criminal offenses spontaneously by interpretation makes law uncertain and incapable of fulfilling its purpose of commanding what is right and prohibiting what is wrong.
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The Patriot Act and follow-up proposals are destroying habeas corpus and permitting warrentless searches and spying. Supposedly, these police state measures are directed toward terrorists, but they are certain to expand, just as asset freezes and forfeitures expanded.
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The common law crimes associated with the poor – theft, assault, and murder – are well defined. Frame-ups for such crimes require prosecutors to suborn perjury, suppress exculpatory evidence, and coerce false confession. To frame a white-collar victim, a prosecutor need only interpret an arcane regulation differently or with a new slant.

To hold a CEO and CFO criminally liable for accounting misstatements that cannot be detected in advance is tyranny. Many justifications have been used for past tyrannies. We now have tyranny in the name of corporate governance and the prevention of accounting fraud.