Many of us – who are not criminals – fear and dislike cops. This apparent dichotomy is interesting but also easily understandable. The cops are, after all, just doing their jobs – as they often say as they hand you a ticket for something like "speeding" or making an "illegal" U Turn. It feels wrong – hence the dislike and the fear. But if you think about it, it's not the cops – the enforcers of the law – who are the problem. The fundamental problem is the laws – plural –  that have nothing to do with crime rather than those who enforce these laws.

We live under a kind of Talmudic law that creates "crimes" and "offenses" that involve no actual harm done to anyone. People are regularly punished for such "crimes" and "offenses," too.

This is a very strange thing when you think about it. It is something most of us instinctively know is wrong – which is very interesting when you stop to think about it. What I mean is that most of us, when we see the flashing lights behind us, do not feel we've done a wrong thing and are about to get what we deserve. We feel angry as well as fearful, since we are now the object of the attentions of a man with a gun. We do not feel like a criminal – in the proper sense – feels. Of course , the actual criminal probably also feels angry as well as fearful, since he has been caught and naturally wants to get away with whatever it is he's done. But he recognizes that he has done something wrong rather than merely illegal, even if he feels no moral twinge about the harms he has caused.