Objective Laws

Objective laws are laws that confine government to its one legitimate function: protecting individual rights.

Laws must be objective in both form and substance. In form, the law must allow each individual to know, before taking any action, what conduct is illegal, why it is forbidden, and what will be the penalty for violation. In substance, the law must forbid only such private conduct as violates the individual rights of others. Laws against murder, for example, satisfy both requirements.

Objective law is the indispensable basis for a “government of laws and not of men.” When law is clear and precise, it leaves no room for bureaucrats or policemen to exercise arbitrary power through unpredictable, subjective decisions. For instance, note the crucial contrast be­tween the law of homicide and the law of antitrust, which forbids “unreasonable restraints of trade,” a foggy term that can be applied to any business transaction—or not, as the prosecutor pleases.

Because government exercises a monopoly on the legal use of force, government’s every action must be objectively controlled and explicitly authorized. Such rigid constraints leave private citizens alone to pursue their lives, free of the perpetual fear experienced under a regime of non-objective law.

Q&A with Ayn Rand

What is the purpose of law?

[A]ll laws must be based on individual rights and aimed at their protection.

Under objective law, what is the fundamental difference in the scope of private action versus government action?

A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.

Must every law be formulated objectively?

That which cannot be formulated into an objective law, cannot be made the subject of legislation—not in a free country, not if we are to have “a government of laws and not of men.” An undefinable law is not a law, but merely a license for some men to rule others.

What is the danger of non-objective law?

An objective law protects a country’s freedom; only a non-objective law can give a statist the chance he seeks: a chance to impose his arbitrary will—his policies, his decisions, his interpretations, his enforcement, his punishment or favor—on disarmed, defenseless victims. He does not have to exercise his power too frequently nor too openly; he merely has to have it and let his victims know that he has it; fear will do the rest.

[W]hen men are caught in the trap of non-objective law, when their work, future and livelihood are at the mercy of a bureaucrat’s whim, when they have no way of knowing what unknown “influence” will crack down on them for which unspecified offense, fear becomes their basic motive, if they remain in the industry at all—and compromise, conformity, staleness, dullness, the dismal grayness of the middle-of-the-road are all that can be expected of them. Independent thinking does not submit to bureaucratic edicts, originality does not follow “public policies,” integrity does not petition for a license, heroism is not fostered by fear, creative genius is not summoned forth at the point of a gun. Non-objective law is the most effective weapon of human enslavement: its victims become its enforcers and enslave themselves.

Don’t strict, precise laws carry with them the threat of oppression and dictatorship?

It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men’s spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear.