The Founders would be entirely unfamiliar with the notion of more & more & more police & prosecutors are necessary, with an unlimited taxpayer-funded checkbook to draw upon for salaries, investigations, prosecutions & retirement pensions.
One further thought - the catch-and-release mentality in our current legal system (once again, a mentality that the Founders would NOT comprehend) might be construed by a cynical critic as a thinly-veiled effort to keep business brisk...
>You also need to take into account the needless proliferation of police & prosecutors - far beyond the needs of the populace.
I do, but that’s another topic IMO; and [at least] tangentially connected to the proliferation of ‘regulations’ & felonies.
>The Founders would be entirely unfamiliar with the notion of more & more & more police & prosecutors are necessary, with an unlimited taxpayer-funded checkbook to draw upon for salaries, investigations, prosecutions & retirement pensions.
Ah, but this system allows for bureaucracy to be needed as in the upkeep/maintenance of criminal records. Consider this: if there were no “three strikes”-style policies, no upgrading of misdemeanors to felonies [esp with multiple offenses], and no extra-internment punishments (i.e. the dis-allowance of firearms from felons who have served their sentence) then what is the need for criminal records to be kept?
(ie if every infraction of the law was viewed, legally, as the same as the first infraction & the serving of the sentence “wiped the slate clean” insofar as the Justice system was concerned, then there wouldn’t be any need for ‘criminal records’ beyond the active-case/”wanted for...”-type.)
>One further thought - the catch-and-release mentality in our current legal system (once again, a mentality that the Founders would NOT comprehend) might be construed by a cynical critic as a thinly-veiled effort to keep business brisk...
That is one mentality that certainly is plausible.
There is another one [too], which is that the practice encourages the “limitation” of rights due to so many people being ‘on probation’ or ‘administrative holding of charges’ (as is common for traffic violations) or [as stated above] the barring of rights to ex-felons.
If it’s not intentional then the assault on the rights of freemen resultant from the practices should have been challenged years ago by the lawmakers.... though things like “we have to pass it to find out what’s in it” seriously indicate that the lawmakers are more concerned with their own positions of power than the responsibility/accountability that such positions [should] demand.