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Comment by uoaei | Hacker News Reader

> it very much stops being a good thing as soon as you bump up with laws that go against your morals

A pretty explicit part of the fascist ideology per se is that laws are merely morals that are written down and enforced. The idea is that people adopt their moral code from the central government who defines how people "should" perceive the world in order to make citizens obedient to the dogma of the state. Willing fascists do everything they can to dissolve any notion of personal choice in the matter, for themselves and for others, and by their very constitution cannot conceive of morals existing outside of a system of authority.

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What else are laws - even in a democracy - if not "merely morals that are written down and enforced"?

I think the difference is that the totality of morality is supposed to come from the state in Fascism.

A well functioning society necessarily ought not legally forbid things that I consider immoral, which allows for personal autonomy with regards to ethics.

I think that would be better stated as in totalitarianism, the totality of morality is supposed to come from the state. Fascism is only one form of totalitarianism.

The issue is in the word "merely".

Of course the goal of law writ large is to engender "good" conditions in a society by restricting "bad" elements and encouraging "good" ones. In this sense the law has a moral quality.

Roughly speaking, "law" is morality as practiced by a state. The difference is in the acknowledgment or ignorance of the laws' congruence with the moralities of the citizens' opinions and preferences those laws are meant to represent. One could say the entire goal of democracy is the messy process of aligning the state's morality with the collective morality of its citizens. Fascism is then comparable to defining a single normative moral position and imposing it on the entire populace unilaterally.

In short, the question is: whose morals?

Laws and morals are both normative claims about the actions of individuals, but while morals are concerned with individual actions, laws must be concerned about societal-level ramifications of not just the actions, but also the enforcement of law. For example, most people would agree that adultry is bad and immoral. But as a society we've decided that its immorality isn't sufficient to overcome the ills of being punishable by the state, and thus it ought not to be illegal. Stealing to feed your starving family is moral, but we don't want to support theft in general so its illegal.

In a free society, one must recognize that legality ought loosely follow morality, with the ideal being that illegal actions are the strict subset of immoral actions which cause greater ill than the enforcement of their illegality. In the absence of an oracle into objective good and evil, a society must err on the side of not making things illegal which could potentially either be not worse than the ill of their enforcement, or not be immoral at all.

The all-to-common trap is to confuse the direction of influence: morality should influence legality, never the other way around. Allowing legality to influence one's perception of morality is simply surrendering your autonomy to those who greatest influence the law, and is a sure-fire path to authoritarianism.

This should be read at every US Federal and State legislature session, every day.

Ignoring this allows the term “culture wars” to define our politics - which is precisely the end of a “melting pot” society

This is an absolutely fantastic post.

Many laws are just mechanisms for coordination and organization of society. In the U.S. it's illegal to drive on the left side, and in the UK, It's illegal to drive on the right. Which side you drive on isn’t a matter of morality. However, knowing that everyone else is going to drive on the right (or left) keeps traffic flowing and reduces accidents.

Wait, so does that mean the "War on Drugs" wasn't making me more free??? The US Government would never do anything fascist so obviously you're wrong.

All laws make you less free. Laws exist to restrict freedoms in order to create a better society - what a better society means is the part where political differences come up. Most people can agree on laws existing to prevent harm unto others, but then what does that mean? Answers depend on your values and goals, and are fundamentally what politics are.

The point is though, all laws make someone "less free", because the purpose of law is to prohibit.

> The point is though, all laws make someone "less free", because the purpose of law is to prohibit.

I think you're wrong. Not all laws prohibit. For example, take a law that establishes public libraries. It doesn't prohibit anybody from anything.

Nah, all government is bad. Socialism is when the government spends money, freedom is when I get paid $5 an hour and eat trans fats

When exactly did I say that all government is bad? I personally think it's great the government restricts the right of people to commit murder.

Why?

The market would take care of it. Instead of police, just hire security.

This is one of the problems with polarization. The legitimate points of one side get grouped in with all the other ridiculous crap.

Every law, every program has a cost. Many times this costs are worth it. And there are plenty of times where they aren't, or have unintended side-effects.

Pointing out these costs and forcing society to recognize them as explicit decisions and tradeoffs is one of the key benefits of the Right, even if you disagree on where they fall on the balance of net-benefits in the final analysis.

TANSTAAFL

> Pointing out these costs and forcing society to recognize them as explicit decisions and tradeoffs is one of the key benefits of the Right

I don't think either side is better or worse at this. It's more like, point out the costs of the other side's policies while glossing over the costs of your own.

Abortion is a great example. I never hear a pro-life argument that starts out "abortion should be illegal but it will create all these unwanted babies and here's what I propose we do about that and what it will cost. We'll vote on outlawing abortion but it will be tied to tax increases to pay for programs to ensure these children have proper nutrition and education."

The idea that the right cares about babies right up until the moment you're born is common enough that George Carlin was joking about it in the 70s.

Don't forget the classic play (used on both sides) of denying there is a problem instead of stating that the cure is worse than the disease.

It’s more than that. People who extract resources tend to be reactionaries who hate taxes more than anything.

They are against schools, against libraries, against whatever, as taxes reduce their return on assets.

It’s all shorted and eventually backfires.

"freedom is when I get paid $5 an hour and eat trans fats"

Whose producer is only happy to collude with the regulatory agencies to get those trans fats declared as safe.

The "revolving door phenomenon" is a worldwide problem. Big business captures the government much of the time.

These days, they might even get their opponents' opinions classified as misinformation.

The law establishing public libraries doesn‘t just say "let there be public libraries". It designates a source for funding, making it a reason that taxpayers are less free. It forces publishers to sell/give books to the libraries.

If it could just exist without restricting someone‘s freedom in the wider sense, we wouldn‘t need a law.

Right. Privately funded libraries didn't need any laws.

It's even worse for authors. They pay taxes to support institutions that exist to lend out the author's books for free.

Lol. Libraries are huge buyers of books and drive demand.

Publishing wouldn’t exist without libraries. Something like 90% of book retail space has vaporized, and the ruthless consolidation makes the top 50 authors utterly dominate sales.

> Privately funded libraries didn't need any laws.

Not sure if this was meant to be a troll, but obviously private libraries depend on someone enforcing private ownership in general. Public libraries have some very specific legal carveouts (e.g. around protecting patron privacy) but otherwise are treated the same as private libraries, only publicly funded.

What about a law that says you are entitled to a lawyer when arrested? Or a law that says if you overpay on your taxes, the government has to make you whole?

There's the 'arrested' part and the 'taxes' part. There are limitations on the power we give the government to arrest people and to collect taxes. But the limitations are only there because of the freedom we loose in exchange for criminals being arrested and public services paid for.

If there was a law that said everyone must only wear blue clothes on Wednesdays, that's taken away your freedom to choose what to wear. If there's an exception to that law that says socks can be either green or blue, that's not the law granting a new freedom to wear green socks, it's a law not taking away a freedom that existed before the blue clothing law.

All laws make you less free, but societies without laws also make you less free.

Freedom is a slippery concept.

This is not true at all. We have many laws which restrict the government. Many amendments do this. Or the Respect for Marriage Act as a recent example, which restricts what the government can prohibit and provides for marriage rights for people who might not otherwise have them.

> All laws make you less free

I offer the 13th amendment (US) as a counterexample.

I mean, that does restrict private tyranny…

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