Return now to Hammer’s caveat that punishing and rewarding must happen “within the confines of the rule of law.” Could not any modern totalitarian state say the same? The Russian government’s jackboot upon the domestic critics of its fascistic war against Ukraine has come down according to Russian law. The Chinese government’s censorship of critics and imprisoning of dissidents proceeds according to Chinese law. The regimes in Tehran and Pyongyang have their laws, too. This is not to deny that totalitarians sometimes act outside their own legal systems. But the systems themselves are inherently totalitarian, because the rule of law has been reduced to the rulers’ caprice.

Florida is far from Russia or China or Iran or North Korea. But there is a precise equivalence as to the temporal sequences. First, those who made the law had obvious personal interests. Second, they made laws that served those interests. Whenever and wherever this happens, to whatever degree, great or small, it is no longer clear that the law restrains lawmakers’ self-interested whims rather than being determined by those whims.

That is what puts the “Gangster” in “Gangster Government.” It is also what makes the consequences Phil warns of, should they come, objectionable. Any citizen justly prosecuted for murder, any corporation justly prosecuted for fraud, has in a certain sense become an enemy of the state. But for the state to declare its private-sector enemies in advance and then endow itself with means of punishing them destroys the guarantee of impartiality and disinterest that we wanted to get from the rule of law in the first place.