FOR AND AGAINST

"Sir," the tailor said to the customer, "your suit costs seven hundred francs."
"Very well, Mr. Tailor, here are seven hundred francs. Give me my invoice, paid, of course..."
The tailor gave the customer the requested invoice, not without first collecting the money.
"That's a closed deal. But six months go by. One fine day, the tailor's customer receives the following invoice from the tailor, on green paper:
"Sir. I have decided to increase the value of the seven-hundred-franc suit I sold you six months ago to nine hundred francs. I invite you to come and pay me without delay, under penalty of prosecution, the two hundred francs you still owe me."
The tailor's claim is indeed a bit steep, don't you think?
Yet there is a major merchant who intends to establish a similar practice with his customers from now on. This merchant is a tailor who cuts us large pants and spends his time "taking measurements." He's the State.
The State is quietly abolishing the principle of the non-retroactivity of laws, a fundamental principle of any jurisprudence worthy of the name. The State is calmly rolling back some of its laws and allowing its old laws to be trampled on like common pedestrians. The State brazenly declares to good citizens, scrupulous observers of current laws:
"It's true... You are in compliance with yesterday's law. But you are not at all in compliance with the law I will use tomorrow. Thanks to the law I will pass tomorrow and which you don't know today, starting today, I am hitting you, taxing you, surtaxing you, retaxing you, ordering you to do this, which is forbidden by law today, and forbidding you to do that, which is permitted today." ...It is impossible for the State to introduce such disorder into our poor lives... It is impossible for the State, which does not allow the laws to be disobeyed, to make a game of disobeying them itself under the cover of some malicious so-called "legal" ruse. We need security, at least in the past, and in the fleeting present. We want, when we have scrupulously observed a law, to be quite certain that we are thus in compliance with the law, with the whole law. We are willing, in the future, to observe new laws. But we do not want these laws, like crayfish, to go backwards and come and pinch us when we have done nothing but obey the laws in force. The Calais Chamber of Commerce denounces this great danger. It is quite right...

Maurice PRAX.