Comment by tetrep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tetrep | Hacker News Reader

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> ...it's the broken ones who turn to crime.

If law were derived from universal morals (heh...) then that might be accurate. But due to the relatively arbitrariness of whether or not someone is a criminal, especially with respect to the great variety of countries in which virtually all of HN would be criminals for freely speaking about various topics, I think it's a bit presumption and mean to call those who "turn to" crime as broken.

Additionally, I would posit that many criminals are not "turning to" crime so much as not "turning away." By that, I mean that crime is not sought out, but rather the criminality of their actions is ignored, much like I presume the mindset is of the majority of jaywalkers.

> Furthermore it's the EXTREMELY broken ones that become the crime lords etc. and those people often have massive flaws in their character such as the arrogance you described.

Once again, I take issue with the use of broken to describe someone's actions simply on the basis that a group of people disagree with them. "Extremely broken" implies some serious psychological issues, which are not at all requisite for running an illegal enterprise. I would posit that many of the people involved in controlling bootleg DVD sales or knockoff brand name goods are in fact very normal and psychologically uninteresting.

I do agree with the assumption of arrogance, as much like politicians, the drive to control on a grand scale typically requires a decent amount of ego, it's incredibly difficult for an individual to exert control of an empire with humility, although I think it's possible, it's just very unlikely outside of a very peaceful organization, which his was most certainly not. Violent groups of people are difficult to control in a non-Machiavellian manner (I would think impossible, but I haven't given it much thought) and I sincerely disbelieve one could rule in such a manner without a decent ego.

Good points. I'll add that the majority of his funds came from illegal pharmacy that was selling drugs people could get from local doctors but might be turned down. To put that into perspective:

1. It's legal to get the drug if a single doctor agrees you need it, you can afford to pay them, and you can afford to pay for the drug.

2. It's illegal to get the drug if Le Roux's doctors do it with their methods at probably lower prices.

So, just being poor means you can't get medicine. That's illegal. But immoral? The law itself sounds immoral here. Further, the law relegates the decision to any human with authorization to prescribe drugs. That makes it quite arbitrary given their range of opinions and actions. So, there's no connection between the law and morality here except perhaps an immoral transfer of money from companies that benefit from the situation to middlemen that pass it to lawmakers. Sounds... like Le Roux's network a little bit, eh? ;)

They mentioned in the article how they wrote it up as providing prescripted medication without a client-doctor relationship. The likelihood of someone buying these drugs for the purposes of abuse are likely much greater than some poor person looking for their brain medication.

The fact that the government later made one of the drugs being sold a controlled substance gives credence to such a theory.

Whether or not that says anything about the morality of law, I'll leave up to you.

Marijuana is a schedule 1 drug and Methamphetamine is schedule 2. Alcohol and Nicotine are legal.

Let's not pretend that there is logic behind the controlling of substances by government and law enforcement.

There is logic but is certainly not uniformly applied!

Probably. Doesn't invalidate my claim. There's all kinds of people who go to the doctor to get drugs like these because it feels better that way. They just have to pay more and get it from specific people for it to be legal. Their motives, the drugs themselves... all the same.

Let's take it further. The drug you need is a cancer treatment that costs $100,000. The drug itself was paid for with a mix of tax dollars and private R&D that resulted in a patent. The patent at this point has paid off its private R&D plus plenty of profit. A Chinese supplier can make the same ingredients with a Le Roux-like company selling it to you. It's illegal to acquire that as the law says you must die or make that drug company richer.

Is morality and the law in alignment when someone is being murdered for someone else to make extra money? Or for people to do time for trying to save their life with a clone?

>If law were derived from universal morals (heh...) then that might be accurate.

Well, there's a pretty big difference between "I shouldn't get arrested for smoking pot" and "I shouldn't get arrested for murdering rival pot dealers."

Maybe western law is mostly derived from a sensible universal moralism with certain exceptions. That doesn't mean that all criminality is rational or that the OP's opinion that most criminals are irrational is wrong. For every Robin Hood there's hundreds of thousands of street thugs. I think you're overpleading the edge cases here. Many studies have shown your average criminal to be a fairly messed up individual: mental illness, strong personality faults, poor reasoning skills, poor executive control, poor discipline, etc.

Is there a meta-analysis that corroborates your last claim?

Alternatively, the law makes a distinction between types of harmful activity that are legal and types that are illegal with interesting results. The kind of very damaging activity smart, disciplined people do that ruins lives is often legal. These are [Wall] street thugs. Then, there's other types of harm the lesser people can pull off that are illegal. There's also stuff they do that doesn't harm other people but is severely illegal.

So, I don't think there's an average criminal given the variety of crimes, levels of harm, and criminals themselves. However, the average criminal on drugs in my area is a working class person who poses no threat to society but smokes weed on occasion. There's also a number of addicts who are similarly not a threat but will receive long sentences. There's also thugs who range from your description to well-educated people who say "screw being someone's b for minimum wage when I can be my own boss for $50k slinging this stuff!" On thugs, similar predatory behavior as many business owners except their type of harm is allowed and affects more people. Even when it's indirect murder.

What's law and what's ethical isn't the same. The law can enforce evil, stop good, and do arbitrary things hard to judge.

> Maybe western law is mostly derived from a sensible universal moralism with certain exceptions.

It's actually easy to show that this isn't possible, because the amount of western law is much larger than a single person could ever hold in his head. This could not be the case for "universal" moralism, which is by definition shared by everyone.

> Many studies have shown your average criminal to be a fairly messed up individual: mental illness, strong personality faults, poor reasoning skills, poor executive control, poor discipline, etc.

I suspect these are studies of caught criminals. They can't apply to uncaught criminals, and they specifically don't apply to Paul le Roux (caught or not) without adjustment for the type of crime being committed. He filled a managerial role; "most criminals" in those studies (and most criminals generally) don't.

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