Politician admits human behavior is not subject to coercive control: “You can write all the laws that you want. But it sometimes doesn’t make a whole lot of difference. People don’t follow them.”

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer — made famous by Senate Bill 1070, which requires Los Angelenos, expatriate Canadian basketball players and huffy has-been musicians to act like idiots in public — observing that a state-wide ban on texting-while-driving will have zero impact on texting-while-driving.

I figure I violate about 300 traffic laws on a typical day — with no consequences, obviously. I’m not being reckless, just efficient, and the cops don’t waste their time on me — which assumes they’re even paying attention. Meanwhile, the City of Phoenix already has a texting ban, which I violate at will, also without consequences.

If you have cultivated the habit of thought, you might stop to think about how many laws you routinely violate. The logical next step would be to wonder if everyone else is just like you: Scrupulously obeying laws that hinder them in no way and breaking all the others.

After that, you might be so bold as to entertain the notion that laws among civilized people are redundant, while laws among the uncivilized are meaningless. And who knows where that kind of thinking might lead you…

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