5 Laws Foreign Countries Got Right (That We Need In America)

Why America Needs This:

Pick literally any year from the United States' modern history and read some news from the era. Just ... any year. Now, ask yourself: Is this not a country that would benefit from a few weeks of annual chillin'? Even your news media could really use the break. For the few glorious summer weeks when the whole country is in off mode, we mostly get calm, soothing news about badgers and shit unless something particularly pressing happens.

Stevebidmead/Pixabay
Even if you miss the work, you can always simulate the experience by letting the seagulls poop on you.

Oh, and there's also the fact that the U.S. is currently the only advanced country that doesn't require employers to provide workers with paid vacation time. You know that old stereotype of Japanese salarymen working themselves to death? These days, that's the American workforce.

Every once in a while, some politician does point at the situation, but Washington has been so aggressively disinterested in providing Americans with paid downtime that you'd almost think that they were working for the companies instead of the little guy. Most recently, some guy from Vermont called Bernard Sanders pushed a bill that would have guaranteed at least 10 paid vacation days to all eligible employees, but it died a pauper's death in Congress earlier this year. (You probably missed it because 2017 politics have been a dumpster fire. Also, you were probably too busy working to hear about it.)

Why America Needs This:

Know those affluenza-inflicted rich kid dipshits who treat the world as their personal joyride and care little about everything that doesn't have their Instagram username imprinted on it? Wouldn't it be fucking sweet if any time they pulled a misdemeanor, you could slap them with a fine so hefty that they (or rather, their parents) would really feel it?

I know, I know. There would be lawyers, and years of court, and a dozen more assorted shenanigans that the super-rich can pull to get rid of a simple fine. There always are. So hey, while we're at it, why don't we go all out? Expand the concept a bit and include companies. While it's not unknown for corporations to fuck up so royally that they get fines that go into the billions, fines from smaller yet still significant stuff like large pipeline leaks tend to be in the five-to-six-figure ballpark, which is pretty much nothing for a large enough company. But incorporate the Finnish day fine system to these corporate misdemeanors, and you can bet your best Sunday butt that the threat of suddenly much heftier fines would at the very least mysteriously kick up most companies' safety standards a notch.

MichaelGaida/Pixabay
"Yeah, actually, an invisible hobo has been running this company all along. Go fine him."

The law is heavily influenced by the indigenous Andean spiritual worldview, which places the environment and the Earth deity known as Pachamama at the center of all life. It treats Mother Nature as a living entity, and includes setting up a separate "Office of Mother Earth" to govern it. Oh, and it also essentially treats people as pests to Mother Nature. And that sounds harsh, but have you looked outside recently? You get it.

The text carefully refrains from outright calling us Earth-infesting vermin, but the planet's rights ("right to clean water," "right to pollution-free living", etc.) are outright stated to be more important than people's, and the person who finds themselves at odds with the law's definition of said rights is in no uncertain terms stated to be shit out of luck. The law deals humans a giant set of limitations, ranging from demands for green energy to recognizing nature's right "to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities". In other words, fuck your highways and fuck your cities. A third Chipotle on the same block is unnecessary.

To be fair, Bolivia's likely pulling a "we're too old for this shit" exasperation maneuver here. The country's president, Evo Morales, has been famously critical of its resources getting plundered by international companies, which is probably a fair argument, because right now the electric car industry is hungrily eyeing the country's extremely fragile salt flats for lithium. Maybe that's why the original 2012 legislation was so hardcore that it managed to freak out the country's farmers thanks to its strict regulations of GMO products and farmland expansion. They've since implemented a longer, heavily revised bill to accompany the Mother Nature Law. That one's hard as shit to find information about, but since the country is to my knowledge yet to implode into a nature-worshiping nationwide cult, I'm guessing they manage.

Why America Needs This:

Ha, no. This would never fly in America. Roads and huge buildings are necessary, even if they sometimes have to go through nature (which they always do, in the same way that all food is organic). But the core point of the law -- recognizing Earth as a legal entity with certain rights -- might be worth implementing. It would be handy in combating bullshit business practices like aggressive fracking, and would counter-balance the anti-environmental attitudes of many politicians in current and past administrations. "Oh, you don't think Mother Nature has a right to live without you actively punching holes in her? Actually, it doesn't matter what you think, because it fucking says so right here."

WikiImages/Pixabay
Plus, every politician arguing that logic would get chased home by this hurricane.

That the whole thing sounds odd as hell wouldn't matter, either. In fact, it would actually be a benefit. There's plenty of precedent to assume that most of Congress is pretty much running on blatant denial of scientific facts. So a law that sets up Mother Earth as a living entity would give the climate-change-denying, anti-environmental old guard a taste of their own medicine: Politicians who do believe in environmental issues could now use the old guard's own well-worn arguments about abortion, self-defense, and whatnot, because Mother Earth is now a legal entity that has the right to live and protect itself. So if a tree falls on and destroys a politician's Benz, well, you shouldn't have been acting so suspicious, bro.

Why America Needs This:

What, apart from "Holy shit, the industry can self-regulate advertising to children?" Try childhood obesity, which has almost tripled in the U.S. since 1980. Sure, there are plenty of contributing factors for this (poverty, for one), but, well ... I'm going to go out on a limb and say that these are not actually helping:

Targeting children in advertising is not only fertile soil to establish tastes that'll last a lifetime, but it's also profitable as hell. Quoth Mark Blades, a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield: "In the United States, children spend $30 billion annually and directly influence an additional $250 billion in family spending. Advertisers aim for children because they want to establish tastes and preferences that will last a lifetime." Those figures are from 2010, so you can give or take a few billions, but what he's basically saying is: "If you get kids to buy the Baja-Blast-Infused Doritos Locos Spicy Five Layer Burrito from Taco Bell, they will continue to order that until they die of a heart attack at 12."

The ban on chewing gum.

RyanMcGuire/Pixabay
This guy's shoe got ten years of hard labor.

The law itself is a surefire one-way ticket to those "wacky foreign laws" articles, but it actually had a point behind it. Apparently, Singapore used to be pretty much covered in old chewing gum, so Lee decided to clean that shit up in a typically pragmatic, hardline fashion: by making it illegal.

Why America Needs This:

Because fuck chewing gum.

Fuck every last piece of that chewy bullshit tainting people's mouths and the world's surfaces. Fuck Wrigley's Institute and their clearly unbiased research on the "benefits of chewing" -- of which I can tell you right now there are none. Fuck all the world's gaping maws distractedly grinding on sugary ass rubber like a cow chewing its food for the 30th time. Fuck bubble gum, which I just now learned is apparently a separate underclass of the worst confectionery of all. Fuck those assholes who insist on blowing those giant bubbles like they were vomiting a second, much pinker head, and fuck the cops who inevitably come to pick me up when I start calling them two-headed witches and attempt to dunk them in water to see if they float.

GiselaFotografie/Pixabay
Go on, guy, taunt me. You're next.

This law is the solution. This law will finally remove this blemish from the face of the Earth, and also from the face of our ... faces. Sure, the Lee version of the law needs improvement; breaking it only carried a little fine, and apparently small amounts of gum for personal use were never illegal (no word on what the law said about intent to distribute). These days, I hear they even tolerate chewing as long as you don't litter. Hardline, my ass. We'll obviously need to outlaw the stuff entirely, and figure out a suitably terrifying punishment to act as a deterrent. I'm thinking rows of large men with flamethrowers, or maybe an arena filled with bears, or bears trained to use flamethrowers. Or being forced to watch Boss Baby. All of those work.

... But I digress. We can hammer out the specifics later. All that matters right now is that we can finally make it all right and abolish chewing gum forever. With this law. Right, guys? G-guys?

Just me, then? God dammit.

Pauli Poisuo also hates unicycles, blue cheese, and the word "millennium." Here he is on Facebook and Twitter.

Be sure to check out our new Cracked Podcast miniseries, "Looking The Part," in which Soren Bowie and Daniel O'Brien are dissecting pop-culture's greatest beards, scars and tattoos. Listen to part one HERE and catch parts two and three in the Cracked Podcast feed on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

For more check out 5 Foreign Rules of Etiquette That America Desperately Needs and 5 Great Ideas That America Should Steal from Other Countries.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out How Gun Control Made Australia Safer Than America, and watch other videos you won't see on the site!

Also follow us on Facebook. We're here for you.