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eridius

Did you just make the argument that the government enforcing the laws is immoral?

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If the law is immoral, wouldn't forcing people to follow something immoral be immoral?

Yes. We were happy when the border control releases folks detained at airport after the immigration ban.

Did you just make the argument that the government enforcing the laws is immoral?

When most of the laws are immoral, then I would say that it is. And an immoral law is - IMO - any time the State is doing anything other than acting, as Bastiat[1] put it, "as the collective extension to our individual right to self defense".

[1]: http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html#SECTION_G004

It looks that way - and for what it's worth, it's not exactly an unprecedented position.

The government enforcing laws is immoral at times. It is the law in Saudi Arabia to stone homosexuals to death.

For many years gay sex was illegal in many states. Likewise many states had laws against inter-racial marriages.

Enforcing those "laws" was totally immoral.

Saudi Arabia is a monarchy and theocratic dictatorship. The law of this country is not made by the people for the people unlike any decent democracy. Picking up the worst example on the planet to try to make your argument look good discredits you.

Ok, so how about slavery. Or eugenics laws in the 1930s. Or Jim Crow. Or anti-sodomy laws in the US. Or women not being allowed to vote. Or like, any, of the literally thousands of horribly immoral laws that have been on the books in literally every country on the planet.

Welcome to libertarianism.

This is not normal.

But on Ayn Rand, it is.

Like other drugs many people experiment with in high school, a little won't hurt you but prolonged exposure to Rand can lead to cognitive deficits and antisocial behavior.

I experimented with socialism in High School. I was actually reading authors much more banal than Ayn Rand could ever hope to be - like Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. Really glad I grew out of that stage.

Gave up half way through Atlas shrugged I'm afraid. I did enjoy how accurately it depicted socialists and social democrats though - as I was reading it I could help but laugh as I've come across people talking like that so often.

The extremes are always wrong.

Depends on what the laws are. A law gains no special moral quality via the legislative process. Immoral laws exist.

OP was arguing that because they don't like the law it's immoral to enforce. Whether or not OP likes the law really has nothing to do with whether the law is immoral.

Not sure I read it that way, but okay. But that reading requires you to ask "why", and sometimes it feels very much like the government lost the consent of the governed a looooong time ago..

If the government had lost the consent of the governed it wouldn't have been elected / it won't be elected again. That's basically what all this is about. Sure, democracy, elections, all this things may not be the best system, but it is very effective at damage control. You don't govern well? You're out after four or five years. All other system known have far worse damage control.

Alternative view: The government has lost the consent of the governed, but people are so engrossed in other stuff that they don't do anything about it due to how painful the upheaval would be.

In other words, it's tolerated rather than accepted.

Roman poets would call this "bread and circuses".

Every revolution in history is proof that this doesn't really work. If the government really looses the approval of the governed and not just of a small minority revolution will follow.

But now is the first time in history with simultaneously our standard of living, access to information, and most relevantly access to distraction.

I'd wager (but don't have the chops to prove) that if you could plot displeasure with government on a graph, and and draw a line where overthrow historically results, the height of that line would roughly correlate with the increase in leisure time, access to entertainment, and decrease in GDP per worker.

I wish I could believe you. I also agree with the sentiment. However, I have worked at Agencies, and ultimately the career bureaucracies are the real governance. https://theintercept.com/2017/01/11/the-deep-state-goes-to-w...

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