A Conspiracy against the Laity

This is what George Bernard Shaw calls “the professions” – those self interested cabals dedicated to keeping their respective shops closed, in the name of keeping standards up.

Of course, a free market would imply that any fool can set himself up as a doctor and charge whatever he can convince others into paying, whether he has any medical training or not – with the principle of “caveat emptor” putting responsibility onto the customer to be happy that the person removing their appendix knows what they are doing.

This is one of the reasons why a completely unrestricted free market is hard to defend. I do not particularly object to doctors having to adhere to some sort of common standards.

What I do take exception to – as I have said before – is the privileges accorded to the legal profession.

And remember boys and girls, the word “privilege” comes from the Latin for “private law”, meaning an arrangement to the advantage of particular individuals which is not available to everyone – which is in conflict with a key principle of legal theory, vis equality before the law.

My business’ landlord and I recently agreed to renew our lease, literally by just changing all the dates on the old lease. We want to stay. He wants us to stay. Simple.

OH BUT WAIT.

For some reason, I have to go and get a solicitor to administer an oath under the Statutory Declarations Act 1835 in order for the paperwork to be legit.

The derivation of THAT word points to the circularity going on here: only if a solicitor (or other Commissioner for Oaths) has made me read out a line of text in front of him and signed the paperwork, would my landlord or I be able to engage other lawyers to sort out any disagreement we might have in the future.

What if we all just...stopped?

I have often thought that if everyone stopped believing in financial markets, they’d disappear. If we all stopped allowing the legal profession to take on the role of authorising everything we do, made the law our servant rather than the other way round and took responsibility for ourselves, wouldn’t they vanish too?