I haven't made a post in a week and I kind of just want to explain something that has been on my mind for a little bit.
Quite a few of the laws in the United States are completely nonsensical. For example, marijuana is a schedule 1 drug. It's quite clear from the definitions of the categories that this drug should be in a much lower category.
1969 - 1973 White House Domestic Affairs Advisor John Ehrlichman explains the reasoning:
"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
This makes me wonder, why are laws written without their reason? And even if they are, there's nothing to say that their logic must be correct. Why don't we just have a super minimal set of goals that the government hopes to achieve with its people, and then all laws are written as syllogisms logically proving that their effect will contribute to the goal? If one can prove a law does not logically help the goals of the government, the law should be rewritten or revoked.
I haven't given it a ton of thought, so I'm sure there are problems with it, but I'd like to know what you think of this idea. If you know if this is or has ever been done, I'd really like to know how it turned out.
