When we think of anarchy, we imagine rioters in the streets, looting, setting fires, and spraying the neighborhood with bullets; Chicago on steroids, beneath the law. When we think of tyranny, we imagine the tyrant: the autocrat above the law, whose diktat is law, and who keeps order below, as would Machiavelli’s ambitious, cold-eyed, Italy-uniting Prince. That we could have both at once seems inconceivable, but so it is, said Francis, in America.
Our betters not only break the law with impunity, they make the law outside of the legislature with impunity, either by judicial imagination or by the caprice of the bureaucrat. Then they apply it to whom they will, how they will, and when they will. When statutory law is a jungle of regulations whose smallest feature no man alive can master, when law is ever at you, crawling up your leg, catching in your hair, glaring at you from the thicket, it is as if there were no law at all; and you are subject to your masters, who hold the guns.