Cui Bono? Lawmaking in the U.S.
In the U.S. the sheer number of laws on the books virtually guarantees that their purported purpose will never be accomplished. In fact, in a number of cases, the purported purpose is simply a ruse for another ulterior motive. Why, for example, is the federal government still so opposed to legalizing marijuana, when so many states have accepted it outright as a legal recreational substance? The purported purpose is that this drug is harmful to health -- yet a significant number of unbiased medical studies show that marijuana can actually help reduce illness. Is this law therefore kept on the books because it benefits the pharmaceutical industry, which can only afford its monopoly on health care so long as natural substances like marijuana are banned? And what about the prison farm system? Is marijuana use still criminalized because it benefits the private prisons and the corporations who use prison labor in the same way they use Asian slave labor, paying minimal wages to increase profit margins (Benns, 2015).
The origination of laws in America is so deeply entwined with the question of "who benefits" ("cui bono?") that one cannot accept lawmaking or lawmakers...
As pointed out in this class, with so many corporations now able to contribute money to political campaigns and thereby influence the
election of lawmakers, it would be folly to believe that these lawmakers are not being bought in order to make the nation a better
place for the companies that stand to benefit. For instance, the
Affordable Care Act has done nothing to make health care more affordable and everything to benefit the health care cartel (the AMA) that pushed for this piece of
legislation within the
Obama Administration. Why should this law be taken at face value -- even as Justice Roberts laughably called it a "tax" in order to justify its validity? Lawmaking in the U.S. has in fact reached its farcical crescendo: anarchy is truly the next step down from here and popular media films like The Purge (and its sequels) appear to profit from exploiting the very real and dangerous lurking desire among the American public to overthrow the current Establishment. This much can be seen in instances from the Oregon wildlife standoff to the current campaign of "outsider" Donald Trump (which has Establishment leaders like William Kristol, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan,
Tim Cook and…
