One of my hobbyhorse issues is the erosion of the right of association. For as long as I’ve been alive, the right of association has been under steady and subtle assault. The ObamaCare legislation, for example, has all sorts of rules that make life more difficult for the religious to be religious by limiting association.

Businesses, for example, are required to pay for things that are against the religious beliefs of the owners. In effect, the owner is now required to hire people that hate him and he has to subsidize their efforts to destroy his religion. In a sane world he would simply refuse to hire people his religion found unacceptable.

But, it’s not just the crowding out of liberty that is the inevitable result of limits on association. We accept all sorts of limits on liberty as long as the trade-off is acceptable. Prohibitions on speech, for example, are welcomed by fee societies in order to buttress public morality. We don’t allow men to copulate with their sisters because we don’t want a bunch of pinheads running around. Public policy is about trade-offs and we often trade away a little freedom for something we find beneficial.

The big issue for me is the irrationality of ceding our right of association to a central authority. This case before the court is a good example.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. on Wednesday warned that “this is going to sound like a joke,” and then posed an unusual question about four hypothetical job applicants. If a Sikh man wears a turban, a Hasidic man wears a hat, a Muslim woman wears a hijab and a Catholic nun wears a habit, must employers recognize that their garb connotes faith — or should they assume, Justice Alito asked, that it is “a fashion statement”?

The question arose in a vigorous Supreme Court argument that explored religious stereotypes, employment discrimination and the symbolism of the Muslim head scarf known as the hijab, all arising from a 2008 encounter at Woodland Hills Mall in Tulsa, Okla.

Samantha Elauf, then 17, sought a job in a children’s clothing store owned by Abercrombie & Fitch. She wore a black head scarf but did not say why.

The company declined to hire her, saying her scarf clashed with the company’s dress code, which called for a “classic East Coast collegiate style.” The desired look, Justice Alito said, was that of “the mythical preppy.”

Ms. Elauf recalled the experience in a statement issued after the argument.

“When I applied for a position with Abercrombie Kids, I was a teenager who loved fashion,” she said. “I had worked in two other retail stores and was excited to work at the Abercrombie store. No one had ever told me that I could not wear a head scarf and sell clothing.”

“Then I learned I was not hired by Abercrombie because I wear a head scarf, which is a symbol of modesty in my Muslim faith,” she added. “This was shocking to me.”

Putting aside the fact this Muslim woman is a liar, why in the world should anyone be required to accommodate her religious beliefs? More important, why should this be a court matter? The court is wholly unequipped to adjudicate these matters. The judges are not businessmen and they have no way of knowing if this company’s dress code is good business. They have no way of knowing if this woman is just a nut causing trouble.

Ms. Elauf, now 24, works at an Urban Outfitters store in Tulsa. A spokeswoman for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which sued Abercrombie on her behalf, said Ms. Elauf was declining interview requests.

A spokesman for Abercrombie & Fitch, Michael Scheiner, said the company “has a longstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion, and consistent with the law has granted numerous religious accommodations when requested, including hijabs.”

The Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed sympathetic to Ms. Elauf’s position, which is that she should not have been required to make a specific request for a religious accommodation to wear a hijab. The company’s position is that it should not have been made to guess that Ms. Elauf wore a head scarf for religious reasons.

In response to Justice Alito’s question about the four hypothetical applicants, Shay Dvoretzky, a lawyer for the company, conceded that some kinds of religious dress presented harder questions, but he said the court should require applicants to raise the issue of religious accommodations.

Several justices suggested that an employer should simply describe its dress code and ask if it posed a problem. That would shift the burden to the applicant, they said. If the applicant then raised a religious objection, the employer would be required to offer an accommodation so long as it did not place an undue burden on the business.

This is the problem created by the state’s encroachment on our freedom of association. It turns all of us into lying weasels. Most American companies know that is not a great idea to hire Muslims to deal with the public. They should be able to not hire Muslims or Hindus or Gingers or whomever. Ms. Elauf would be faced with a choice. She can assimilate or head back to the home country. In other words, she would retain her freedom of association and the business would retain its right to hire as it sees fit.

Instead, the state tries to craft more and more laws to meet every possible condition. Assortativity, the natural inclination of human beings, therefore requires everyone to come up with clever ways to dodge the rules. In response, the state comes up with ever more rules that are often in conflict with other rules. We now live in a country where a Christian store owner is prohibited from exercising his religious inclinations, but must allow his employees to advertise their religious affiliations in his place of business. That’s simply madness.

That’s ultimately the problem with all of this. It is fundamentally at odds with human nature and it is riddled with internal contradictions. Worse yet, it fosters a subtle hostility between people, forced together against their will by rules that make no sense. As the saying goes, things that cannot last eventually end. In the case of crackpot social engineering schemes, the end tends to be very messy.

I tend to think of “secessionist movements” as collections of harmless old weirdos with too much time on their hands. The operative word being harmless. As we see in Europe, the West is well past violent insurrection. Instead, the angry confine themselves to posts on Facebook, Twitter and the secession club meeting at the local Holiday, as long as there is a breakfast buffet. We do, however, have a cop problem.

In a deliberate “show of force,” federal and local police forces raided a political meeting in Texas, fingerprinting and photographing all attendees as well as confiscating all cell phones and personal recording devices.

Members of the Republic of Texas, a secession movement dedicated to restoring Texas as an independent constitutional republic, had gathered Feb. 14 in a Bryan, Texas, meeting hall along with public onlookers. They were debating issues of currency, international relations and celebrating the birthday of one of their oldest members. The group, which describes itself as “congenial and unimposing,” maintains a small working government, including official currency, congress and courts.

According to MySanAntonio.com: “Minutes into the meeting a man among the onlookers stood and moved to open the hall door, letting in an armed and armored force of the Bryan Police Department, the Brazos County Sheriff’s Office, the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office, agents of the Texas district attorney, the Texas Rangers and the FBI.

“In the end, at least 20 officers corralled, searched and fingerprinted all 60 meeting attendees, before seizing all cellphones and recording equipment in a Valentine’s Day 2015 raid on the Texas separatist group.”

“We had no idea what was going on,” said John Jarnecke, president of the Republic of Texas. “We knew of nothing that would warrant such an action.”Information Liberation noted, “The pretext of the raid was that two individuals from the group had reportedly sent out ‘simulated court documents’ — summonses for a judge and a banker to appear before the Republic of Texas to discuss the matter of a foreclosure. These ‘simulated documents’ were rejected and the authorities decided to react with a ‘show of force’ – 20 officers and an extremely broad search warrant.”

Even allowing for the fact this is reported in World Nut Daily, there’s simply no excuse for this behavior from government officials. They are harassing people to get their jollies. It’s why dressing up mall cops in battle gear is a very bad idea. It takes low-IQ dimwits and sociopaths and tells them they have a free pass to push people around.

In the custodial state, however, the cops function as hyper-violent helicopter parents. If a citizen is doing something the authorities think is unsafe or uncooperative, the state sends in a swat team as a “show of force” or worse. There are over 50,000 SWAT raids a year in America. Most are for things like serving a summons or collecting non-violent parolees. The argument is the cops don’t know what they are getting into so for their safety they send in Seal Team Six.

This is the logic of the managerial class. Police departments have arrived at a bizarre sense of self-awareness where they no longer see themselves as part of the community. They stand apart from those they watch, like game keepers in a preserve. While their job is to keep the animals safe, their first priority is their own safety above all else, fueled by a deep distrust of those they supervise.

It’s not just the town clowns stocked up with surplus army gear paid for by the Feds. NASA has a SWAT team. They can no longer hurl a man into orbit, but they have a SWAT team. The Department of Education has a SWAT team. Again, a lot of this is due to the unlimited access to funding for status items that are popular with the managerial class. The streets of DC are jammed with armored SUV’s toting minor officials for the same reason. No matter the reason, it is no way to run a civilized nation.

The managerial class, which the cops are a part, although at the lowest rung, must always attack and undermine the institutions of traditional social life if its power and interests are to prevail. Freedom of associations, along with its subordinate right, freedom of expression, are always under suspicion. These are the breeding grounds for resistance to the managerial class

It’s why Europe has little sympathy for the Charlie Hebdo victims. The rulers make a show of it while the issue is in the press, but they immediately go back to suppressing speech and association. The European rulers don’t fear Islam or Islamic terror. France is not going to convert to Islam. They do fear their own citizens, deciding for themselves and amongst themselves that they may prefer different arrangements. That’s a real threat. As far as the managerial elite is concerned, the shooters did them a favor.

This will not end well.

My pet theory about why societies decline is that their ruling classes lose the will or incentive to enforce the rules they created to govern themselves. It’s a take on the broken windows theory of law enforcement. Once you start letting the little violations go, the next level of crimes are then permitted. The rot creeps higher and higher until no rules are enforced or seen as a deterrent. Without Marius, there can be no Caesar.

It’s not linear or inevitable. New York City reformed itself. Giuliani sorted out the police force and prosecutors office, cracked down on petty crime and began a program of ethnic cleansing. The people running the city, the wealthy financial class, no longer saw any benefit to letting the lunatics run the place so they brought in a new man to address the problems. They had an incentive to do so, which was the need for safe, livable real estate for their servants.

The Romans, in contrast, never had an incentive to reform their system and return to a republic. The Senatorial class saw their interests in centralized authority and therefore went along with the drift toward empire. Given the choice between one of their own having dictatorial power and sharing power with the lower classes, they chose the former. That meant ignoring all of those rules and customs of the republic. When that was not practical, they invented clever ways around those rules and customs.

In modern America, you see much of the same at the top. The Obama administration looks at the law as a puzzle to solve so they can get around the limits. Congress routinely looks the other way as their own rules are broken. Boehner and McConnell see a benefit in letting the executive run wild. It spares them the risk of doing their job and lets them collect massive amounts of cash. There are a lot of rich men in Congress who came to Washington penniless.

The problem with rot at the top in a modern society is it tends to spread to the more mundane parts of the empire. This story from the backwaters of the America South is a good example.

The latest example of cellphone video vindicating someone from false charges is a doozy. It comes from Washington Parish, La., and WWL TV.

One of the worst days of Douglas Dendinger’s life began with him handing an envelope to a police officer.

In order to help out his family and earn a quick $50, Dendinger agreed to act as a process server, giving a brutality lawsuit filed by his nephew to Chad Cassard as the former Bogalusa police officer exited the Washington Parish Courthouse.

The handoff went smoothly, but Dendinger said the reaction from Cassard, and a group of officers and attorneys clustered around him, turned his life upside down.

“It was like sticking a stick in a bee’s nest.” Dendinger, 47, recalled. “They started cursing me. They threw the summons at me. Right at my face, but it fell short. Vulgarities. I just didn’t know what to think. I was a little shocked.”

Not knowing what to make of the blow-up, a puzzled Dendinger drove home. That’s where things went from bad to worse.

“Within about 20 minutes, there were these bright lights shining through my windows. It was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I mean I knew immediately, a police car.”

“And that’s when the nightmare started,” he said. “I was arrested.”

He was not only arrested, he was also charged with two felonies and a misdemeanor. A prior drug charge on his record meant he was potentially looking at decades in prison. Seven witnesses backed up the police account that Dendinger had assaulted Cassard.

But Dendinger had asked his wife and nephew to record him serving the papers. It was a last minute decision, but one that may have saved him his freedom.

From what can be seen on the clips, Dendinger never touches Cassard, who calmly takes the envelope and walks back into the courthouse, handing [prosecutor Leigh Anne] Wall the envelope.

“He’d still be in a world of trouble if he didn’t have that film,” said David Cressy, a friend of Dendinger who once served as a prosecutor under [former St. Tammany District Attorney Walter] Reed. “It was him against all of them. They took advantage of that and said all sorts of fictitious things happened. And it didn’t happen. It would still be going like that had they not had the film.”

Dendinger spent nearly a year waiting for trial, racking up attorney’s fees. As a disabled Army veteran on a fixed income, Dendinger said the case stretched him financially, but in his eyes, he was fighting for his life.

After nearly a year passed, his attorneys forced Reed to recuse his office. The case was referred to the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office, which promptly dropped the charges.

Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission and himself a former prosecutor, studied the videos. He did not hesitate in his assessment.

“I didn’t see a battery, certainly a battery committed that would warrant criminal charges,” Goyeneche said. “And more importantly, the attorney general’s office didn’t see a battery.”

That’s all well and good. And Dendinger has since filed a federal civil rights lawsuit. I hope he collects.

But here’s my question: Why aren’t the seven witnesses to Dendinger’s nonexistent assault on Cassard already facing felony charges? Why are all but one of the cops who filed false reports still wearing badges and collecting paychecks? Why aren’t the attorneys who filed false reports facing disbarment? Dendinger’s prosecutors both filed false reports, then prosecuted Dendinger based on the reports they knew were false. They should be looking for new careers — after they get out of jail.

If a group of regular citizens had pulled this on someone, they’d all likely be facing criminal conspiracy charges on top of the perjury and other charges. So why aren’t these cops and prosecutors?

I could be wrong, but my guess is that they’ll all be let off due to “professional courtesy” or some sort of exercise of prosecutorial discretion. And so the people who ought to be held to a higher standard than the rest of us will once again be held to a lower one.

This is something we see everywhere at the top. Jon Corzine stole billions from his clients, breaking many laws in the process. He is given a pass because he is a one of the beautiful people. The CIA gets caught spying on members of Congress and nothing happens. No one goes to jail for what used to be considered the highest crime imaginable in a republic.

This rot at the top filters down so that the local prosecutor gets away with what should result in prison time. Everyone in the ghetto, for example, knows better than to talk to a cop because cops get to lie and break the law. No good comes from dealing with the cops so no one talks to the cops. The orderly society is thrown into reverse.

Herbert Stein’s Law comes to mind, but probably does not apply. There’s no reason to think the decay of social order in America must stop or that people in charge will reform themselves. There are plenty of examples where societies went through periods of reform and renewal, but there are examples of ones that simply collapsed. The stories above suggest the rot is deep and far advanced. Reform may simply be impossible.