[John Beresford Tipton]

" Probably we are a whole nation of criminals if they wanted to enforce each and every law on the books. And it's not going to get better."

BINGO!

There are enough laws, and vague ones at that, that you might be a "criminal" and not even know it, and then you'd have a Hell of a lot "to worry about".

All it takes is a prosecutor to target you and voila you're a "criminal", and all the rest of us can rejoice with a hearty:

LOL, but he has "nothing to worry about"

That there are too many such laws and that a prosecutor can pick his victim and then find the law to nail him is well known. Justice Jackson, a former US Attorney General and later Justice of the Supreme court wrote:

"With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some sort on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who committed it, it is a question of picking the man, and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him."

[skinkinthegrass]

Didn't Justice Jackson served during the FDR era?...gave FDR fits. :/

[Proud_texan]

"All it takes is a prosecutor to target you and voila you're a "criminal""

Yep, I figure that if a DA wants to inspect close enough he can nail anybody or at least cost them enough in legal fees to ruin all but the most wealthy. So what if he doesn't get a conviction, you're broke.

I guess there's some clamor for "lawmakers" to make laws and get paid for what they do and for LEO's to enforce them and that's what they do.

What a nice change if they took a couple of years off to simplify the legal code.

But then the growth and intrusiveness of government has been going on since day one, such seems to be the nature of humans that put other humans "in charge".