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Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

The most harmful thing prohibition did was normalize flouting the law, I'd argue it also introduced in popular American culture the concept that an individual could judge the law and decide whether it was just or not.

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> I'd argue it also introduced in popular American culture the concept that an individual could judge the law and decide whether it was just or not.

It seems that this is a fundamental principle in US culture. The nation was born of a revolution. It was literally a triumph of humans and reason over entrenched authority and written law. (Obviously, these people were flawed. They were not infallible moral authorities. This is for anyone who wants to read me as a white-washer.)

Specifically in the legal realm, jury nullification has a long history in British common law. This carried over into pre-revolution American law. It has also carried over to modern law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification_in_the_Unit...

Flouting laws is American tradition dating back to the British Navigation Acts. It is what the country was founded on.

Because blind obeisance to the law has been the source of many ethical travesties.

I don't see that normalization as particularly harmful, given that the law is so often merely a tool of state oppression.

Why do Americans even think that? Wouldn't it be better to just live in a country where the law is not used to oppress people?

It's a defense-in-depth strategy: a written constitution with enunerated rights to avoid bad laws; divide power to isolate and extinguish bad laws; and allow citizens routes to evade enforcement in case we still end up with bad laws.

Systems always fail. Handle the failures with something better than SIGABRT.

That thinking might have made sense 300 years ago, but not today.

Can you explain?

I have very little confidence that human beings can actually create that sort of country — at most we can only aspire to it.

I’d say that happened a couple hundred years earlier when we tossed a bunch of tea into the bay.

I.e. "scofflaws" - a person who flouts the law, especially by failing to comply with a law that is difficult to enforce effectively.

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