41–50 of 63 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. What does that tell you? It tells you exactly what the commenter is saying. This is a really silly 'test'.
> It tells you exactly what the commenter is saying. This is a really silly 'test'. I think you and the other commenter are seriously missing the point.
It sounds more like they are disagreeing with the point, which is not at all the same as missing it.
“Will this law make it difficult or impossible to protect innocent life from a government intent on their imprisonment or death?” This makes no sense to me. A tyrannical government can change the law. If there’s a law that will make it easier for them to commit atrocities, they can make it happen. Enacting that law now , or refusing to do so, won’t make a bit of difference. Laws should be evaluated on their merits as…
> A tyrannical government can change the law The article is not talking only about tyrannical governments, or laws passed by such governments. The test the article is proposing is meant to apply to any law passed by any government. The example of Jews in the Attic is just an illustration; it's used because one of the article's points is that failing to apply the test early on, when your government is not tyrannical b…
My point is that I disagree with the basic premise. Laws which help tyrannies oppress and murder people are not necessarily the same laws that turn good governments into tyrannies. I see no reason the two should be connected.
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What happens if the Army is told to kill everyone of a particular race? If maniacs take power, we’re deeply screwed. Our efforts should go toward making sure that doesn’t happen.
Absolutely agreed, and I think decentralization is a part of that. Instead of a single point of failure, spreading power between multiple groups reduces the potential damage and the incentive to corrupt a system. Consider a treaty organization organized against a hypothetical enemy. If the adversary succeeds in corrupting and neutralizing one of the member states, that is significantly less damaging than if it were a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot of people who live in places that are essentially lawless, but that experience isn't freedom like extreme libertarians might believe. It's total fear that at any moment 20 people in shitty Jeeps can drive up and threaten to cut off your hands unless you kill your parents and join their gang. This is what we refer to as the state of nature. At some point, people get pretty tired of it, so they form the…
> The rule of law is a bedrock principle of human civilization The article is not advocating abandoning the rule of law. It is advocating judging laws based on a particular criterion. The fact that many existing laws do not meet that criterion does not mean no laws do, nor does it mean the only alternative is to abandon laws altogether. For example, consider the law against murder. Does it meet the criterion? Of cour…
Not at all. What if the Jew in the attic had to kill an errant Nazi out of self-defense?
> Government monopoly on medical care. This is a bit surprising -- isn't it? If it is illegal for you to pay someone for anonymous health care then how can your "Jews in the attic" receive health care? This is absurd. The government also has a monopoly on law enforcement, so if "Jews in the Attic" are victim of a crime how can they seek justice? From this premise, to suggest the government should not enforce laws is…
> The government also has a monopoly on law enforcement, so if "Jews in the Attic" are victim of a crime how can they seek justice? They can't. So by the proposed test, a government monopoly on law enforcement is a bad thing and should be opposed. If you ask "how can it be possible not to have a government monopoly on law enforcement?", note that historically that has been more often the norm than the system we have…
If the government didn't have a monopoly on law enforcement, what you'd end up with are rival gangs each enforcing the law in their own biased way, propogating the amount of injustice we're already dealing with, and decentralizing it, making it harder to fight.
When you have a centralized source of law enforcement, you have a "single point of failure" that you can apply pressure to if it becomes corrupt, much in the same way that electric vehicles centralize the source of emissions making it easier to sequester.
Decentralization is not a panacea.
EDIT: That's not even considering the fact that without the government providing law enforcement, among other things, that many would be guaranteed to go without those things. Right now that may be the case for many with the current system, but at least that is fixable by, again, applying pressure to the single source to adequately provide those things. In a system where the free market is supposed to take care of this, many poor folks would go without. That used to be the case with fire fighters, but we soon learned that it was a bad idea for nobody to show up to fight the fires of the poor folk, because those fires would spread. Same goes for crime, disease, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The rule of law is a bedrock principle of human civilization The article is not advocating abandoning the rule of law. It is advocating judging laws based on a particular criterion. The fact that many existing laws do not meet that criterion does not mean no laws do, nor does it mean the only alternative is to abandon laws altogether. For example, consider the law against murder. Does it meet the criterion? Of cour…
>For example, consider the law against murder. Does it meet the criterion? Of course. Not at all. What if the Jew in the attic had to kill an errant Nazi out of self-defense?
Killing in self-defense is not murder.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It tells you exactly what the commenter is saying. This is a really silly 'test'. I think you and the other commenter are seriously missing the point.
> I think you and the other commenter are seriously missing the point. It sounds more like they are disagreeing with the point, which is not at all the same as missing it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A tyrannical government can change the law The article is not talking only about tyrannical governments, or laws passed by such governments. The test the article is proposing is meant to apply to any law passed by any government. The example of Jews in the Attic is just an illustration; it's used because one of the article's points is that failing to apply the test early on, when your government is not tyrannical b…
Then perhaps the article should choose a more illustrative example. My point is that I disagree with the basic premise. Laws which help tyrannies oppress and murder people are not necessarily the same laws that turn good governments into tyrannies. I see no reason the two should be connected.
Can you give any counterexamples? Also, bear in mind that the criterion in the article is not "does the law help tyrannies oppress and murder people?" but "does the law make it difficult or impossible to protect the innocent against the government?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The government also has a monopoly on law enforcement, so if "Jews in the Attic" are victim of a crime how can they seek justice? They can't. So by the proposed test, a government monopoly on law enforcement is a bad thing and should be opposed. If you ask "how can it be possible not to have a government monopoly on law enforcement?", note that historically that has been more often the norm than the system we have…
This is an asinine concept much in the same way that people being opposed to electric vehicles is an asinine concept. If the government didn't have a monopoly on law enforcement, what you'd end up with are rival gangs each enforcing the law in their own biased way, propogating the amount of injustice we're already dealing with, and decentralizing it, making it harder to fight. When you have a centralized source of la…
If this is your definition of "asinine concept", I think you need to re-examine your criteria. Not everyone who disagrees with your pet beliefs is asinine.
> If the government didn't have a monopoly on law enforcement, what you'd end up with are rival gangs each enforcing the law in their own biased way, propogating the amount of injustice we're already dealing with, and decentralizing it, making it harder to fight.
This claim is historically false. I referred elsewhere in this thread to David Friedman's Machinery Of Freedom, which gives a number of historical counterexamples.
> When you have a centralized source of law enforcement, you have a "single point of failure" that you can apply pressure to if it becomes corrupt
But you also have a single point of failure that special interests can apply pressure to to make it corrupt. Which, historically, is far more likely to happen than what you describe, because the special interests are concentrated while the people as a whole are dispersed and can't easily coordinate.
> Decentralization is not a panacea.
Nobody has claimed that it is. The fact that decentralization is not a perfect solution to all of society's problems is irrelevant to the point that decentralization, all things considered, is better (because it has less damaging failure modes).
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Not necessarily. Even assuming there's an intention to fire the gun in the first place (it might be meant as a deterrent), there also might be the intention to only wound the assailant. Not all gunshots are fatal, after all. Of course, even a shot to the leg can be fatal, but the intent is still not to kill.