From: Randall Randall (wolfkin@freedomspace.net)
Date: Tue Jul 30 2002 - 04:56:11 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
> Randall writes
>
>>disobey any given law. Whatever the posturing of politicians
>>and lawyers, each individual *does* decide which laws to obey:
>>the only remaining question is whether the individual should
>>use his or her own reason and experience to guide that choice,
>>or simply submit.
>
> I say that their reason and experience should cause them to
> conclude that they should obey even the laws they disagree
> with, (fanciful exceptions aside,
With the number of deaths attributed to government in the 20th
century alone standing at well over 100 million people, I hardly
think you can call exceptions 'fanciful'. The word seems to
imply that you believe that people just make up these things,
or that such things can't happen where you live, so aren't
worth worrying about.
> and it being understood
> that one lives in a fundamentally democratic society).
It seems to me that the only bearing brought by living in a
"fundamentally democratic society" is the assumption that laws
in such a society will be more likely to be good laws. If
that is the case, why not cut to the chase and advocate good
laws?
If that isn't why you support "fundamentally democratic" societies,
why do you?
>>At least in the US, the role of law appears to be to pad the
>>pockets of the legislators. That is, each of them votes for
>>or against laws based on future prospects, rather than because
>>they have carefully considered the rule under consideration,
>>and decided that this one is good. If this had workable
>>feedback which drove the system toward the enactment of good
>>laws, and toward the repeal of bad ones, this wouldn't be a
>>problem.
>
> There is such a mechanism. The representative must run for
> re-election. Don't think that the legislators are any less
> human than the rest of us, and have any fewer mixed motives.
> Yes, a primary motivation is indeed their career advancement,
> and how well it will go over back home. But they also get
> self-righteous, idealistic, moral, patriotic, revengeful,
> compassionate, and so on too.
There is a large body of discussion already extant on why
our current system creates so many new laws, so I won't go
into it here.
> Democracy is the least worst
> of governments because of that feedback from the voters.
Democracy may be better than other forms of government. However,
even democracy gave us WWII and the slaughter of the Native
Americans. It seems clear to me that the problem is government
in and of itself.
> A slight exaggeration, but I agree, only slight. I think the
> reason is *power*. By passing more and more laws, it becomes
> less and less easy for the citizen to know what to expect or
> what the rules are, and so the judges and police increase
> their power of discretion. The cop can pull you over if he
> feels like it, and have a very good chance of finding something
> wrong. Judges in America since the time of Earl Warren strive
> to do "what is right" rather than follow the law. The old
> bastard used to literally say this to his fellow justices,
> "yes..., that's the law, but is it right?". Slowly, we become
> a nation ruled by men rather than laws.
There has never been a nation ruled by laws. Such a thing
sounds nice, but those who enforce the laws still must
choose to do so. President Jefferson of the US acknowledged
that he was violating the Constitution himself during his
term in the early 1800s.
> Slowly, we succumb to
> the notion that only if we had *good* people in office, and
> they had enough power, our problems would be ameliorated.
Actually, the problem is that those in office already have too
much power. While I am in favor of no government at all, I
would be much happier with a government which was actually
limited to the Constitution of the US than I am with what we
have now. :)
>>How can we obey the law, Lee? You have already conceded that
>>any given individual cannot even *know* if he or she is lawful
>>in every way. Given this, strengthening a meme which is
>>certain to lead to failure in many cases seems willfully
>>counterproductive. Each and every person in the US is very
>>likely a criminal, if not a felon, per the laws currently
>>in effect. Since it is impossible to live one's life in a
>>way certain not to break the law, why should a person try?
>
> Or, since it is impossible to avoid math errors, why should
> one even try? Or since it is impossible to be objective, why
> should anyone try? I'm really surprised that the quest for
> certainty has popped up here. You can't be serious.
But it *is* possible to avoid math errors. :) The point I'm
trying to make is that since most people are already lawbreakers,
striving not to break the law in order not to be a lawbreaker
is quixotic.
More importantly, reinforcing the meme that one should obey
one's legislators whether their pronouncements are right or
wrong seems to me to be an incredibly bad idea. This meme
of submission to authority is the one of the final steps from
democracy to tyranny.
> Moreover, technically speaking, of course, someone's a criminal
> only after being convicted of a crime.
Well, 'criminal' is also used for those who have merely committed
a crime.
> You're also continuing
> the theme of several people here that those actually convicted
> of crimes aren't any different from another sample of people
> picked at random---no more prone to commit further crimes and no
> more likely to be guilty of moral offenses. You should do a
Let me clarify. Since there are presumably a higher proportion of
murderers, rapists, etc. in prison than in the general population,
it is of course true that statistically prison inmates are more likely
to commit even crimes I agree should be crimes than the average
person on the street. At the same time, it is also true that the
majority of actual prison inmates are people who are just like
the average person on the street, except that he or she was in the
wrong place at the wrong time, or angered the wrong person. There
is a major difference between statistics averaged across a whole
group and individual members of that group, such that if you made
up a group from all extropians' list members and 5 murderers, the
statistics would show that members of this group were more likely
to commit murder than the general population, while the majority
of members of the group would *be* you and me and others on this
list. This is the major point I'm making: prisoners do not form
a useful statistical grouping, because so many of them are there
for victimless 'crimes'.
It is also true, however, that those sent to current US prisons are
far more likely to commit crimes that I would agree are crimes when
they are finally released than those same people would have been
*before* being sent to prison, which was Charles Hixson's point, I
think. The prison experience doesn't make one less likely to commit
crimes, but more.
-- Randall Randall <randall@randallsquared.com> "Congress keeps telling me I ain't causin' nuthin' but problems and now they're sayin' I'm in trouble with the government; I'm lovin' it" -- Eminem
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