In a nanny-statism culture, people's bodies belong to the state.

You are always dancing to the dictates from bureaucrats of every stripe, armed enforcers, connivers, snivelers, environmental-influence peddlers and anybody else who cares to have a say in your physical well-being.

Yet your soul still belongs to God, unless you did a deal with the devil. And what is lodged in your heart and mind to be right are hopefully still in tact under your personal ownership and control.

But those birthrights to think and say and do what lives in our hearts and minds as right are being hi-jacked by a force called too many unnecessary laws.

In Canada, between 1975 and 1997, more than 100,000 new federal and provincial regulations were passed. None was known to be repealed.

Those statistics don't even account for territorial and municipal acts, laws, bylaws, rules, regulations and policies.

At least 25 per cent of the new laws came from the Parliament of Canada. But the prime minister can completely bypass his rubber-stamp parliamentary factory to create new laws and modify existing laws with a flick of his Bic.

He can change the Criminal Code to create new crimes and fabricate new offences and designate new punishments. He can even make laws that exempt him and his ministerial cabal from the law, and place the national police above the laws.

As governor-in-council, he can personally change the laws of Canada by signing orders-in-council, which are supposed to be reserved for housekeeping purposes. Six a year are five too many.

Yet the prime minister and his hand-picked ministers sign thousands each year that change laws overnight with the stroke of a pen.

"Government is not reason and it is not eloquence," said George Washington, the first U.S. president. "It is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

Meanwhile, ordinary people tippy-toe through life in an unsuccessful attempt to be "law-abiding citizens". The term is a bit of a misnomer but used to distinguish individuals, who try to obey all the laws, from the people who intentionally harm others through crimes of force.

Nobody can walk down the street, much less own a business, without committing crimes on a regular basis.

Have you ever stood on the street corner talking to a friend and been joined by a third party? Two is a conversation; three is a conspiracy, especially if you're talking about something illegal, which you most likely are.

At some point when kids are growing up, good parents put their underage babes back on the bottle to teach them responsible drinking under strict home supervision. Serving alcohol to a minor, huh?

Are you in possession of a bottle of ammonia under the sink and a bag of fertilizer in the garage? Ah-hah. Bomb-making materials.

Did you ever fill out a government form incorrectly because you can't figure out the tangled instructions? Lying to a bureaucrat. Or you "neglected" to report an insignificant amount of income to Canada Customs and Revenue Agency? Tax evasion.

Oh, dear, the list of infractions are already longer than the judge's arm.

One day, I dropped by to see a friend who was in his yard taking measurements and jotting figures on a piece of paper. He announced plans to build an extension onto his house.

Silly me. I asked if he were close enough to starting the project to have submitted plans and had obtained a building permit. He laughed so hard, he bent over double, hugging his sides.

"Me?" he gasped between guffaws. "Ask the city for permission to build something on my own private property? You must be kidding?"

If a bylaw officer stumbled upon the illicit project, the property owner would be issued a ticket and be required to pay a fine. If the sinner didn't pay, he would eventually be summoned to court. The court would order him to pay the fine.

If he didn't comply with the court order, there would be a warrant for his arrest. If he resisted arrest? The same thing could happen to him as happened to the man who refused to wear seat belts. He was shot.

Have we lost all our senses? Have we all gone mush-minded mad? Have we lost our freedoms? Is society losing its ability to distinguish between what we don't like, what we don't need, and what should be considered criminal?

Every day, another aggravating scheme is brought forward by some do-gooder to make people safer, healthier and to protect us from ourselves.

To evaluate whether violation of a law ought to be a crime, California Senator Ray Hayes suggested we ask: "Are we really willing to shoot someone over it?"

Decision-makers always dismiss the argument as silly, unrealistic:

""We're not going to be shooting anybody for smoking in public, or for building an addition without a permit, or for not wearing a seat belt."

What if Whitehorse residents get balky and refuse to licence their cats?

Think again about those seemingly innocuous, well-intentioned laws that supposedly only carry fines.

"What if (people) are so tired of being nitpicked to death by nanny-statism that they just snap and refuse to be taken alive?" asked the Senator in an article for the "Orange County (California) Register".

"What if people refuse to allow the police in their homes, or they refuse to pull over their car when the officers try to arrest them?"

At some point, somewhere along the way, if something is made to be a crime, someone may have to shoot somebody to enforce the law, he reminded.

There are any number of examples to explore how enforcement of laws have backfired. Senator Hayes chose the recent scenario of the Cincinnati black fellow who was killed for not wearing his seat belts.

He hadn't paid any of his tickets and had refused to respond to court orders. When pulled over on a day last April, the police only knew there was a warrant for his arrest. The police didn't know it was only a seat-belt violation.

The criminal probably detested the seat-belt law and was reacting defiantly toward authorities telling him what he could and couldn't do. Possibly he couldn't afford the fine, either. Timothy Thomas was just a kid, about 20 years old.

He obviously didn't want to be arrested. He roared off in his car, leading the police on a lively, high-speed chase that ended in tragedy.

The police, probably pumped on adrenalin, said they thought the man reached for a gun. It turned out he hadn't. Possibly he was only reaching for seat belts to buckle up before giving up. We will never know the criminal's side. He can't talk.

The police shot him and sparked a race riot. He died over a seat-belt law--not because of the police, per se--but because a bunch of do-gooders thought it was a grand idea to force people to wear seat belts.

"Was it worth it?" queried Senator Hayes. If you're going to have laws on the books, they have to be enforced, he added. Otherwise, they're useless and breed contempt for that law.

"(But) no matter how high-minded the law sounds, it's only power comes from the business end of a gun," advised the Senator, who has a strong message for those who support, pen and pass laws.

The next time anybody wants to dictate what the guy next door can and can't do, or thinks they're improving everybody else's lives by forcing people to comply with their glorious ideas, the politicians, bureaucrats, general public--even physicians, who now practice politics in the spirit of public safety (helmets, seat belts, gun prohibition)--need first to answer a sobering question.

"Am I really willing to shoot someone for this law?"

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Copyright 2004 diArmani.com