> Anyone (loosely defined) can build a bridge but it takes an engineer to
> design one.
If you are game to take a bridge design from an engineer and set about building it, I would be eager to watch you do it.
> Ask yourself what other profession so openly appears to lie to the
> public every time they appear.
In the last few years, I have had occasion to rely on lawyers to keep a close relative out of jail twice. They did a good job, and I thoroughly appreciated their work, though they did cost a pretty penny. But it was worth it. (PS -- they didn't tell a single lie in the process.)
> We live in a very complex world and lawyers are a necessity. I would
> never argue otherwise. Anyone who argues that lawyers don't attempt to
> increase their necessity (and therefore their power) by making things
> more complex doesn't live in the real world any more than someone who
> advocates their abolition.
Even when the world was much less complex, there were lawyers, and the complaints that they just made things more difficult to justify their own employment, and "made the worse case appear the better" by lying, and so on, date back to ancient Athens (the Sophists were the lawyers of their time), at least. I would suggest that the complexity of a lot of laws has more to do with political pressures from non-lawyers than from lawyers themselves. For example, the unbelievable complexity of the tax law, it seems, is not due to tax lawyers trying to keep themselves in business, but to all sorts of powerful interests putting pressure on Congress to get loopholes for themselves written into the law. Yes, lawyers on the staffs of the Congresspersons write the laws, but the original pressure comes from the economic interests.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org _________________________________________________ "Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents."
-- Arthur Schopenhauer