I used to think that laws were necessary for orderly interaction. I now see that laws are often a trap that most people succumb to when they think they are getting to tell other people how to live. Laws that anyone makes that are to be enforced by a central agency, even if it seems to be to control someone else, inevitably limit everyone’s freedom and hinder our ability to take care of ourselves.
I hesitate to say that many laws ultimately limit economic freedom, because we have been trained to think of economics as both a dry and selfish subject. Economics is, however, the engine that makes society run. It can be a good engine or a bad engine, depending on who designed it. God who gave man freedom of mind or a central controlling government?
We could get into an interesting discussion of how God is sovereign over everything, and how people make lots of mistakes. But the fact is that we know that someone has to work to provide what is needed for life. We also know that we have some sort of choice about how we go about that. If the motivation of reward is reduced and other people benefit from 1) our efforts or 2) how we are controlled (like in this example of the meat industry), we become dispirited. We don’t produce.
Laws tend to be a pernicious way of giving the benefit to the other fellow. Whether it be handing them our money after a little governmental laundering, or more subtly restricting our ability to prosper, laws tend to be more political tools of manipulation than implements of freedom.
These factors affect even the world of the starving artist. Or, possibly, they contribute to the starving aspect of that world. Is it a case of justice and morality, or is it really about who gets to limit our freedom?