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Comment by ameister14 | Hacker News Reader

>it is never proper for the legislature to target an individual or individual company. It's perfectly fine for enforcement agencies (OSHA, FDA, IRS, FAA, FTC, SEC, etc) to enforce policy/law on individuals/companies who have been found in violation, but to originally target individuals with the force of government lawmaking is a dramatic overreach of power, IMO.

I don't agree. It's been done before, many times, and to the benefit of the people. Look at what was done with JP Morgan, Standard Oil, Rockefeller as an individual person, multiple Railroad companies and trusts to start.

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"To the benefit of the people" and "does violence to the rule of law" are not mutually exclusive, at least in the short term.

Enforcing any law inherently does violence to people. Do you wish to pedestal law above people? And if not, do you want them on equal footing?

I personally would like to work toward a culture that doesn't require law and, barring that, law that peacefully respects a person's decision to revoke consent to be governed at any moment's notice.

Blanket consent for government isn't realistic or sustainable. And even if it were, it isn't consent without being free to revoke it.

"Government" of any variety, stripped of all its pomp and circumstance, is just a set of rules for people to agree to follow so they can live next to each other without regular resort to personal violence. "Revoking your consent" to government means that you no longer want to follow those rules. It's not clear why the other people around you should accept your presence without that agreement.

Even anarchy is itself a rule about how people interact; even an anarchist group will have expected processes -- maybe they're ad-hoc, but rules nonetheless.

And I expect you think you should still be privileged to the benefits of the governed society although you refuse the agreement: easy access to goods/services, and a market for your own. Again, why should the other people make that allowance for you when you reject the group?

If anyone can opt out the rule of law at any point then it is the same as having no law in the first place. Which means the ones with the most weapons get to decide. Which means we are back to having a government except without any rights and protections for everybody else.

It's no more of a travesty when "violence to the rule of law" is done against corporations than when it is committed against poor people.

Also, AMZN built their empire by exploiting interstate sales tax loopholes to undercut brick and mortar competitors. Why shouldn't their representation under the "rule of law" be proportionately undercut?

> It's no more of a travesty when "violence to the rule of law" is done against corporations than when it is committed against poor people.

This seems like a rather blatant false dichotomy.

And yet, "does violence to the rule of law" seems quite dubious in both the case referred to in the original article, and in the above-cited context.

What wsa done to these entities, with individually-targeted laws?

Antitrust law applies to the entire economy (except Major League Baseball and a few other bad cases).

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