Desperately Seeking Consistency

“And, as Michael Lind pointed out in Tablet, Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Hill was not the only Capitol Hill taken over by extremists thanks to a lax police presence—witness ultra-progressive Seattle.”

I would never have heard of Colin Chapman had it not been for Top Gear. While I have never been anything close to a motorhead (sorry, petrolhead), I have always found the wit and antics of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May (first on the BBC’s Top Gear and now on Amazon’s The Grand Tour) quite amusing. And, while the political dimension of their irreverent impishness is generally limited to their political incorrectness and Clarkson’s rants about the nanny state, their references to Chapman, founder of Lotus Cars, have implications for law, order, and criminal justice in the United States.

“Simplify, then add lightness,” was Chapman’s mantra. It is not necessary for a car to contain a huge number of parts in order to be high-quality. If a company can give its customers what they want—while using fewer inputs than its competitors—it should do so. Apply this thinking to public safety (and the question of when it is necessary to regulate human behavior), and one gets a fairly straightforward, general rule about how much government should involve itself in the lives of its citizens.

When government at any level must curtail freedom for the sake of public health and safety, the law should be easy for citizens to understand and adhere to. Complexity, a long list of details and caveats, goes in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, how much intervention is truly necessary? If an action is not really causing anyone any harm (even granting that the meaning of harm is not always easy to agree on and is being constantly inflated), why prohibit it? To what degree should Americans expect government to make their lives convenient and pleasant, as opposed to secure, especially when that convenience entails the restraint of some people’s freedoms, freedoms that others take for granted? A government that regulates fewer aspects of life but is rigorous and uncompromising in protecting what really matters—human safety—is one that citizens can respect and believe is fair.