On expediency...................

Not only does the action of Governments not deter men from crimes; on the contrary, it increases crime by always disturbing and lowering the moral standard of society. Nor can this be otherwise, since always and everywhere a Government, by its very nature, must put in the place of the highest, eternal, religious law (not written in books but in the hearts of men, and binding on every one) its own unjust, man-made laws, the object of which is neither justice nor the common good of all but various considerations of home and foreign expediency.

-Leo Tolstoy

Infected...................................

     Periods of speculation had always fostered dishonesty, but in the nineteenth-century American stock market this tendency was even more pronounced.  The corruption of speculation was not limited to company promoters and stock operators; it infected the entire political class of the 1860s.

............................................

     Having burnt their fingers at direct speculation, the New York legislators reverted to the more certain profits of bribery. ... Gould subsequently travelled to Albany with half a million dollars in cash - needless to say, the money technically belonged to Erie shareholders - in order to bribe the legislators to validate retrospectively the new issue of shares.   Vanderbilt played the same game but was defeated by Gould at (what Adams called) the "legislative broker's board, where votes are daily counted."  The total expenditure on bribes in Albany during the summer of 1868 was estimated to exceed a million dollars.

-Edward Chancellor,   Devil Take The Hindmost:  A History Of Financial Speculation

Too many laws......................................

Ignorance of the law has long been held to not be a sustainable defense, but given the passage of some 40,000 new laws in 2014, how is one supposed to keep up with the criminalization of our daily lives?  Police Departments (and Grand Juries) around our fair land have been taking a metaphorical beating lately.  Maybe the answer is that we should ask them to enforce fewer laws.  One of my favorite blogs takes a look at the issue here.  Wee excerpt here:

This kind of race-based law enforcement is given the stink-eye by our friends on the left, but they can't seem to draw the obvious inference:  the answer is not better police.  The answer is fewer laws.  Decriminalize normal nonviolent daily activity, and the police will have a lot fewer excuses to harass people they don't like and who can't fight back.

Opening paragraphs.......................

Forty minutes out of London, passing through the rolling green fields and cherry orchards of Kent, the morning train of the South Eastern Railway attained its maximum speed of fifty-four miles an hour.  Riding the bright blue-painted engine, the driver in his red uniform could be seen standing upright in the open air, unshielded by any cab or windscreen, while at his feet the engineer crouched, shoveling coal into the glowing furnaces of the engine.  Behind the chugging engine and tender were three yellow first-class coaches, followed by seven green second-class coaches, and at the very end, a gray, windowless luggage van.
-Michael Crichton,  The Great Train Robbery:  A Novel (1975)

Crichton's tale is a fictionalized version of The Great Gold Robbery of 1855.  Wiki's accounting of the affair is here.

Fifty years ago...........................

Live TV 11/24/63...........Jack Ruby shoots Lee Harvey Oswald

I was only eleven, but I'm pretty sure I watched this live.