A couple of stories caught my eye over the weekend.

The first was the one involving Bob Dylan being pulled over by a couple of young cops while taking a walk in a New Jersey neighborhood a few hours before his show that evening. The theme of the story is how funny it is that neither of the 20-something year-old policeman recognized the iconic musician.

However, my thought was the same as Radley Balko’s — how sad it is that a 68 year-old grandfather cannot go for a walk in a neighborhood without being confronted by a couple of policeman and ultimately escorted back to his hotel. Dylan was doing nothing wrong and there was no report of a crime in the area, yet he is pulled over and taken off the street simply because he left his ID back at the hotel. As with the Gates affair, the primary reason that police are getting away with treating citizens in such a manner is that most of the public is simply making light of it when it happens to someone else.

Meanwhile, the Dylan affair received more publicity than even a greater outrage — that is, the guilty plea to racketeering charges of Gary S. Kaplan, who did nothing other than create and help run the publicly-owned internet gambling company named BetOnSports (previous posts here).

You may remember this lurid case from 2006. Avaricious federal prosecutors, with apparently nothing else to do, indicted BetOnSports, Kaplan and several other of the company’s executives were arrested while changing planes in the U.S. despite the fact that the company was not accused of doing anything dishonest toward its customers, who simply enjoyed placing bets online. As a result of the arrests and the indictment, BetOnSports ultimately liquidated, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for American customers.

In essence, Kaplan and his associates were thrown in U.S. jails for years before trial and told that a business that they believed was legal was a criminal enterprise even though it was being run in the open and publicly-traded on the London Stock Exchange. Apparently, U.S. prosecutors now believe they can enforce even ambiguous U.S. laws on any business, wherever based, solely because some of the customers of the business happen to be Americans. The legal theory is bad enough, but the imprisonment of foreign businessmen passing through the U.S., while at the same time causing American citizens to suffer undeserved financial losses, reflects a serious lack of adult supervision at the Department of Justice.

Sure, Dylan is a funny old man now. And who cares about a few foreign businessmen who get inconvenienced by the American criminal justice system?

But as Sir Thomas More reminds us, "when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat? .   .  . do you really thing you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?"

One of the clearest lessons of the 20th century is that large governments, unrestrained by their citizenry, have the capacity to cause unspeakable evil. As injustices such as the foregoing unfold with nary a protest from citizens, is that lesson already forgotten?