No, laws should be applied equally to everyone.
You should not be punished more harshly because you are a "government agent." What does your postal clerk have to do with some idiot congressman who passed too strict a law on child porn?
You should not be punished more harshly because you are a "government agent." What does your postal clerk have to do with some idiot congressman who passed too strict a law on child porn?
Highway patrol officers who break traffic laws without using lights and sirens should be punished more severely than a first-time offender who is a normal citizen. Cops who abuse their power need to serve prison time.
With great power comes great responsibility.
We give our public school teachers a lot of power over the lives of our kids, by entrusting our kids to them for several hours a day. If they abuse the public trust, the potential for damage is much higher, and the punishment should be correspondingly more severe.
If we let our schools enact zero-tolerance policies for punishing our kids, we have the right to enact zero-tolerance laws for them f*ing with our kids' lives.
I don't disagree, but that's not what the law says. Get it into a law, and then reality will match up with your belief.
If they're not up to being held to a higher standard, they're not up to having authority.
Plus, enforcing more harshly on them brings attention to bad laws.
Like I said, if they're unwilling to accept this, if they want to be treated like an ordinary citizen, they can quit govt work and become one. No one is forcing them to work for govt.
Every paper-pusher can make your life a living hell. Every teacher and adminstrator can punish your kid. And, I haven't even mentioned police, DAs, judges, and folks who are supposed to exercise discretion.
Janitors and the equivalent are about the only govt employees who don't have considerable power. They're a small minority of govt workers.
i wish americans would understand this. that they don't means that abuses of power are treated in two completely different ways here. if it's the government, it's bad. if it's anything else (which typically means a private company) then it's "you shouldn't expect anything else you naive fool".
Except that it's not, because govt power is qualitatively different. A company can't throw you in jail. All that a company can do is refuse to deal with you.
> i wish americans would understand this.
I wish that non-Americans actually understood power.
Real power is when someone can do something to me or stop other people from dealing with me. It isn't when they refuse to deal with me.
all that matters is power. the distinction you make above can easily be handled in terms of power: someone who can throw you in prison has more power over you than someone who cannot. restricting that to "government" adds blinders. for example, it takes the focus away from those that pay lobbyists to enact and enforce certain rules. by focussing on power and those that wield it you are freed from distortions like that.
it's no different to any other field: focussing on the abstract concept lets you handle more cases. talking about "oop" is often more useful than talking about "java"; focussing on "government" rather than "power" is the same mistake as confusing java with (all of) object oriented programming.
of course, java is (probably) the largest oo language, just as the us government is (probably) the largest source of power. but that doesn't stop the more abstract approach from being more useful.
Since the power to throw me into jail is restricted to govts ....
> of course, java is (probably) the largest oo language, just as the us government is (probably) the largest source of power. but that doesn't stop the more abstract approach from being more useful.
As I've shown, govt power is qualitativively different.
Moreover, you're trying to use "they have power too" to ignore govt power.
And, interestingly enough, almost all of the examples of corporate power are actually govt acting on behalf of govt. And yet, you seem to think that more govt, that ignoring govt power, will solve those problems....
Yes, abstractions are useful. Yours is an excuse to ignore the big power problems of the world.
Government workers generally don't exercise their own authority in these respects they apply the local rules and laws. I don't know how USA school boards run so I can't say for sure this is true in the school situation however.
FWIW, my understanding is that messing with the post in general is a federal crime. It has nothing to do with the government employee being more 'important' than the common man; that's just an unintended side effect.
We know. We think that the law is wrong.
Note that DAs tend to give their fellow govt employees, especially police, a pass, so in practice the law is easier on govt employees. It's a trifecta of tribal, lobbying by govt employees, and "one hand washes the other".
> It has nothing to do with the government employee being more 'important' than the common man; that's just an unintended side effect.
Actually, it's quite intended. Look into the history of how those laws came about. They were lobbied for by govt employees.
And then there's the fact that DAs tend to go hard whenever a fellow govt employee is a victim. It's the same trifecta.