Its kinda amazing but this article contains the primary thesis-es of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. This brings up some important questions that I think its worth pondering.
Namely, that government creates crimes to control people, ("There is no way to rule an honest man. The only power government has is over criminals. Thus we create more and more laws until every man is a criminal.")
...and that this control relies on people accepting the easier way out, rather than standing up for their rights. (In Atlas, the alternatives offered the strikers were always easier than striking.)
At the end of the day, the question they both pose is this: If some action really is immoral, is it not immoral for you to support it? If the war on drugs is immoral, is it not immoral for you to pay for it? If you're going to pay your taxes (a practical choice to be sure, even if you feel its immoral) why not match them by supporting organizations working to reform or eliminate the immoral actions those taxes fund? (e.g.: anti-drug war orgs, or a org that underwrites defense attorneys for people charged with drug crimes who want to fight them with a jury trial.)
If you're on a jury, are you going to listen when the judge tells you that you have to convict if you conclude that the person charged did in fact have drugs on them? Or are you going to judge the law (one purpose of the jury) as well as the facts, and stand proud and hang the jury if you're unable to convince them the drug war is immoral? Are you willing to lie on the jury questionnaire in order to get on the jury in the first place (since the questionnaire is designed to weed out people who will be immune to the jury tampering judges regularly engage in with their instructions.)
Or do you recognize this as immoral, but still think that the "justice" system itself IS moral because... its the government?
These are all rhetorical questions. I'm sure my position is obvious by the questions I'm asking, but I'm not looking to debate here, I'm just providing a perspective. And my amusement that the NYT would write a story with such parallels to Atlas Shrugged.
One final parallel is that in Atlas, the system continues to deteriorate, even when most people know its wrong, because most people fool themselves into thinking that injustice is justice. (or are anti-mind, have adopted a philosophy that is against reason.)
So a final question- does an immoral law have any power? Or is it null and void simply because its immoral? (In Maybury v. Madison the supreme court ruled that unconstitutional laws are invalid the day they are signed, no need for supreme court review to invalidate them... yet we had to have a constitutional amendment to create prohibition, but we never had one for the war on drugs...)
If a cop pulls over a driver and then searches his car and finds drugs, and you believe the drug laws are immoral, are you willing to admit that the cop is a criminal? (Or is "just doing your job" an excuse that gets him off the hook?)
If morality is objective, and the "law" he's enforcing is immoral, then the cop is the criminal in this hypothesis. If morality is subjective, then the cop somehow is made moral when doing this, because law somehow conveys morality on otherwise immoral acts. (Again all rhetorical. I'm going to log out now and enjoy my Sunday.)
> Namely, that government creates crimes to control people, ("There is no way to rule an honest man. The only power government has is over criminals. Thus we create more and more laws until every man is a criminal.")
Things like public health directly contravene this concept. There is a collective public good (say vaccination), it only works if some percentage of the population opts in, either through incentive or obligation.
Infants are protected from whooping cough only by our ability to guarantee vaccination of other citizens (since they are protected not by the vaccine itself, but the cocoon effect of having a vaccinated population that is not susceptible to whooping cough).
In other words, governments definitely do have power over honest people.
I prefer to think of it in terms of economics. There aren't honest people and dishonest people; there are incentives and people who respond to them.
The question is what your political and economic system incentivizes. In the face of good incentives, most people are good. In the face of bad incentives, no amount of moral clamoring will save your society.
Economic incentives are sandwiched between two other factors. One is more attractive, and tends to dominate discussion, and the other is more powerful and tends to dominate actual behavior.
The more attractive force is morality. People consciously approach their own behavior in moral terms, and they struggle, occasionally successfully, to defy economic incentives that conflict with their moral values. This personal focus on morality (even if it is a narcissistic delusion) makes it much more natural to discuss policy in moral terms than it terms of incentives. I don't think this is helpful for policy discussions. We should all follow what we think is right, but policy needn't reflect moral consensus.
The more powerful force is culture. Think of all the people in jail for selling drugs who could be living middle class lives if only they had rejected their social identities and social ties to follow economic incentives. It's hard to imagine more powerful economic incentives than the ones operating in American life today. If you're a poor kid and you dedicate your life to achieving technical competence in a highly paid profession, the economic elite is ideologically invested in the idea that you should be rewarded with a comfortable, secure upper-class life. Not only are they eager to see you assume the most economically productive position in life you can, in order to bolster the U.S. economic growth that their investments largely track, but even more importantly, denying you the social position you've earned would undermine the legitimacy of their social position. And if you shoot for Harvard law or Harvard medicine but fall short, you'll still fall in the upper middle class somewhere. The incentives couldn't be more clear, but mistrust and cultural ties muddy things up. The fact that people make many of the most crucial decisions of their lives as ignorant children, or have those decisions made for them by ignorant parents, gives culture a big advantage over incentives. People don't see incentives with perfect, X-ray vision. They see them through whatever lens they've been equipped with by their upbringing.
The effectiveness of incentives, then, depends on cultural factors. In the case of corporations and thoroughly bourgeois businesspeople, we underestimate the power of incentives. In the case of everybody else, we overestimate the power of incentives. In the case of persuading inner-city youth to dedicate themselves to lucrative (for us as well as them) middle-class lives instead of lives of crime, our failure is less in providing opportunity (aka incentives) than in teaching them to see the opportunity and believe in it so that it becomes possible for them to work towards it.
I do believe laws should be seen more as a system of incentives than as enforcers of a privileged morality, but laws should be designed to be effective incentives for the people who live under them, not for homo economicus.
I understand the point you're trying to make, but I don't think there is a single country in the world (free or otherwise) that makes it illegal to abstain from vaccination. If there is such a country, please correct me—I simply couldn't find one after a few minutes of research.
The benefits of vaccination for the receiver of the vaccine are usually enough to entice voluntary vaccination. In fact, I'm sure there are plenty of civic-minded people who get themselves (or their children) vaccinated for the benefit of everyone else, too.
The government would only feel compelled to forcibly vaccinate its citizens if people refused en masse to get vaccinated. And that would likely only happen if the cost/risk benefit ratio for getting vaccinated was (perceived to be) unsatisfactory.
In that case, do you really want to criminalize honest, well-intentioned people who are abstaining? I'd say no—that'll create a bitter backlash, because these people don't feel like they deserve to be criminals. Instead, you'd want to educate those people and explain to them why it is worth it to get vaccinated (alternatively, if the vaccine really is too risky, you'd want to improve the vaccine). When honest, well-intentioned citizens oppose something en masse, simply making them all criminals for the common good is likely to make them oppose you, distrust you, and listen even less to what you have to say.
I'm not aware of a country that makes it illegal to abstain from vaccination, but it's bureaucratically difficult in the US once the child reaches school age. I know that the state I grew up in (Virginia) required proof of vaccination upon entering public school. Even my college required proof of vaccination.
Which is something I hadn't thought about when it comes to the anti-vaccination crowd. I wonder what they do when their kids need proof of vaccination for school.
You just need a good reason not to be vaccined, preferably attested by a doctor.
It's not such a rare case I think, and for any vaccine there is be a small percent of children with allergies to one component or are known to badly react to the vaccine.
In many places I know of, it is as simple as a parent writing a letter claiming to be opposed to vaccination on philosophical and/or religious grounds.
My parents were very anti-vaccination and are part of a 'religion' that exempts us from it... all we needed was a note from a 'religious leader' and its done... I'm not vaccinated for anything. The religion is 'The Universal Congregation of Wisdom' (its very chiropractic, my dads a chiropractor... the 'religious doctrine' is pretty entertaining...)
you can join with a letter and like a 200$ donation or soemthing
It's always a possibility, sure, but I doubt that everyone who skipped vaccinations wants to homeschool. The sets of people could even have significant overlap, but I imagine there'd still be a decent number of who skipped vaccinations who don't want to homeschool.
Uruguay (the country where I live) has compulsory vaccination, there's a family undergoing a lengthy trial for their right not to vaccinate their children:
"In Uruguay, vaccination is compulsory. The law states that you must have a current vaccination certificate to go to school and access other services and benefits, such as receiving family allowance payments or process the health card, which among other things enables joining sports clubs." (I'll add that the health card is compulsory for working as well)
They had to go to exile to Argentina
A summary with their point of view (both Spanish and English)
"Imagine in a small town (Tarariras), a family
(Borgogno Arce) which would not give their
children the required shots, because they react with
convulsions and the doctor had recommended no
vaccinating; a school principal—requested by other
parents—that would not admit the children to class
if they didn´t get their shots; the people of the
town—out of ignorance—would point this family
with their finger wherever they went, because they
thought that the parents didn´t give the children their
shots because of religious or ideological reasons; a
government that compels them—without legal
grounds—to give them the shots under the force of
the law; and an exile in Argentina, painful and
humiliating, an offensive alternative to anyone with
a small amount of humanity."
Government states that they didn't want to get vaccinated for religious or philosophical reasons (those are not valid in Uruguay):
"The case was well known and controversial in the country, they would not vaccinated for religious or philosophical issues " said Dr. Savio, a local expert.
Ayn Rand doesn't usually admit any precedent for her ideas, but anarchists and some socialists have had a similar diagnosis since the 19th century. For instance, Kropotkin's "Law and Authority", published in 1886.
I wish that were true, but it's not. Laws are not the only source of unfair leverage. Private enterprise can and does have lots of ways to rule (and screw) even honest people. e.g.:
Exactly, Rand was a master of telling half-truths. While the quote makes sense on the surface, she gently shuffles aside the many economic ways you can control an honest man (denying him food, resources, housing etc).
It's worth publicly observing that the only libertarian movements that I've seen which really attack not just governments but also government-like institutions, are bizarre anarcho-socialist libertarianisms.
I like to put this in concrete terms like so: we get crappy and overpriced food at the TU Delft because the University contracts with a catering service named Sodexo. It's become a point of ritual that our department saunters down to the canteen, orders a dreary meal, and then complains about it. This is the sort of problem which libertarians want to solve with more competition. That's a noble idea, but what competition, exactly? I don't have the freedom to start up a restaurant of my own nearby -- I would need the university's permission. The university is thus in some sense government-like: it owns territory, demands some sort of 'tax' in the form of tuition from the denizens of that territory, probably charges Sodexo certain 'property tax' analogues for operating there, and businesses cannot operate on their territory without their explicit consent. The Men With Guns that I've heard libertarians talk about are sort of there, but a step removed -- that is, if you did try to open up this restaurant you would probably receive a threat and ultimately the police could escort you away; just as might happen if you sit-in on courses without paying tuition and they catch you. The most major difference is that universities can expel you; usually criminals in a nation get imprisoned, not deported.
I guess what I'm saying is, It's not just "economic ways you can control an honest man", but there are potentially many ways to implement an authoritarian state inside a libertarian utopia -- and to me that just sounds like "there's something wrong here." It's like a security vulnerability in a political stance, or so.
I don't know; I don't have the answers. I was a libertarian once and then I got a bit too perplexed by this sort of thing.
I'm a fellow Sodexho hater, but sorry, your argument isn't compelling. While you might not like their food, you clearly find its "value" (taste, convenience, etc) superior to the alternatives (bringing lunch, taking a longer lunch, hanging jobs, etc). You don't have the right to open a competing restaurant inside a McDonalds either; that doesn't make them the Men With Guns.
Well, it's not about what you have the "right to open." If you start using that terminology then anti-libertarians will just start to say, "a government is sovereign and has all sorts of rights on their land, including a right to tax." Suddenly you start saying, "you don't have the right to not pay your taxes either; that doesn't make them the Men With Guns."
That's why I was very careful to say that the curiosity is that many libertarians are perfectly OK with "government-like institutions." The point is nothing to do with Sodexo or even my interpretation of its value -- the point is that what I can or can't do in response is controlled by a bureaucracy called the TU Delft. That's really my focus, not Sodexo itself.
The fact that I accept Sodexo over the alternatives thus has no bearing on this point that, if I wanted to open a competing business to Sodexo, I'd need to accept the authority of (and pay taxes to) an entrenched bureaucracy which most libertarians do not really have any ideological problems with -- the university -- and which would ultimately enforce its own policies with police action where necessary. To the extent that I have an "argument" (and I'd say that I probably don't; I'm probably just wasting time on Hacker News), you have not refuted any of its premises.
If your university sucks, switch to another. Or pursue starting up a new one.
I realize that you aren't saying that your university sucks, the point is that you can change it, it is subject to competition and cannot use possibly lethal force to compel you. My argument would be that with time, since the university is subjected to competition, it will get better or perish (or the whole industry gets "disrupted"). If you have an environment where things are subjected to competition, those government-like institutions will get better. Albeit slowly. Thus the opposition of the large government, since the large government will very effectively hinder hopes of such environment, at least in a libertarian opinion.
It's not that the government-like institutions aren't a problem, but the large government is the bigger problem.
A side note: It is my understanding that one of the aims of the seastanding stuff is to provide more competition between governments.
Another side note because maybe some don't know it: there are major differences in opinion inside groups of people who identify as libertarian in what is an acceptable scope of government, or if it should indeed exist at all (the extreme). Thus the "libertarian opinion" I used is a misnomer.
I guess in the pseudo-analogy (universities are government-like), there is also indeed a pseudo-analogy of the form, "if you don't like your government and its tax system, move somewhere else. Oh, you don't like any taxes? Well what did you expect -- that governance would be a free lunch?" -- and that "oh, you can change your government, it is subject to competition in a quite-unregulated market of international governance" and so on. The larger point is that there is an opposition to governments which isn't opposed more generally to government-like structures -- and that arguments which libertarians would support for government-like structures are ones they would confidently reject for governments. ("I shouldn't have to change governments!" becomes "I shouldn't have to change universities", or "I can't change the government, I'm not a senator" becomes "I can't change the university, I'm not a dean.")
It seems, as you say, that the only distinguishing feature is its size -- that there is no libertarian ideological opposition to big government, because it's the same things that they ideologically support at small scale, but there is just a pragmatic opposition to big government because it is big. So all of the stuff about Initiation of Force is at best inconsistently applied and at worst total crap.
Now that works for most modern libertarians, but I think it would not work for Ayn Rand. More interesting are the libertarians who take a doctrinaire opposition to the government, but it really requires, as I said earlier, an anarcho-socialist vibe of "governments shouldn't enforce real estate regulations or trademark laws, those are already Initiation of Force in some fundamental sense, 'don't walk here or I'll hurt you', 'don't say this name without my permission or I'll hurt you'."
> "It seems, as you say, that the only distinguishing feature is its size"
No. Well yes, but it's confusing to say so, the point is in the location of the government in the "pyramid" if you will, it's the "top dog". If government is not such as to allow competition and is willing to enforce such position, and it's reach is far and wide, the rest of the environment is doomed. In such an environment, there will be no competition for government-like institutions, and they will suck forever and ever.
That is to say, there is no hope in those institutions getting better if you don't have the environment fixed first.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with those institutions existing, since in a competitive environment they do not have the force to compel you. They may fool you with fashion and fads and reality distortions, but fundamentally they can not compel you with force. And that force to compel is something the government has and doesuse, in fact it asserts a monopoly on using such force.
If some government-like institution has such a force, you can dig down and see that the force is actually granted to it by the government. (this follows from the government's assertion of monopoly on such force)
Since most current governments allow some kind of limited competition, things do usually get a little better very very very slowly, speed depending mostly on the amount of competition allowed. Obviously culture has an effect on how bad it will get if the government's power is great etc. etc.
> "Now that works for most modern libertarians, but I think it would not work for Ayn Rand"
To me Ayn Rand is more like romance novels for libertarian leaning people. Her points are seductive but ultimately lack rigorous substance "in the real world", fun to read though (or watch the movies, or listen to, since there are some songs that have some quotes in the lyrics). So I don't really care if some argument would work on Ayn Rand or not. It is my understanding, from n = a small number, that similar positions are not rare. Very cautious attitude is also exercised towards other cult-ish stuff like stefbot.
> "More interesting are the libertarians who take a doctrinaire opposition to the government, but it really requires, as I said earlier, an anarcho-socialist vibe of ... those are already Initiation of Force in some fundamental sense"
To me, that has an anarcho-capitalist vibe, granted this is probably because of difference in social scenery. I do know that the anarcho-socialists have similar arguments, I'm mostly familiar only with Chomsky's. Btw. anarcho-capitalists are infuriating and interesting to talk to.
Wow that's a lot of text for a point that is so clear in my head. I hope it gives you a plausible explanation why some reject the government but not the government-like institutions.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, "look one level down." You're very concerned with who has the monopoly on force, but that's not actually vital to your concerns. What the government, or a government-like institution, does that you don't like is not "have a monopoly on force" but rather "arbitrarily prevent competition." You say "If government is not such as to allow competition... the rest of the environment is doomed." That's just as true at the level of these government-like institutions. They control an environment and can certainly doom it.
I think your response earlier took the form "not so! there's an entire environment outside the university which does not necessarily suck!". But there's also an entire environment outside of your present government that does not necessarily suck. A modern state isn't much more than a bureaucracy tied to territory. (There is a pretense of independence from other institutions but in reality that can often be compromised by military actions, treaties, and sanctions.) To be fair, since World War II the countries of this world have gotten much more shy about letting people cross their borders, and it's much less like driving into the university quad and a bit more like requiring swipe-card access and ID to enter a university cleanroom. But let's not mistake rights exercised with rights possessed.
Actually, most of this way of thinking comes to me from stefbot. Stefan Molyneux is... well, let me put it this way: when he says something I agree with, I become much more skeptical of that thing: so I actually treat him as having a negative correlation with reliable knowledge. This happened most prominently when I started reading his tome on objective moral facts. I would like, on a good day, to believe in objective moral facts. This has been shaken by reading his work which attempts to prove them.
So, like, if you just listen to the very first Freedomain podcasts, he seriously constructs a totalitarian government-like dystopia inside of a libertarian minarchy, and all the while he seems to be perfectly happy about this embedding. I will confess that I had given up Objectivism many years before I first heard this podcast, and no longer considered myself a libertarian at this point, but this was the moment where I started being really skeptical of the libertarian promise. That is where I started to think about to what extent libertarians really oppose totalitarianism, if it can exist in government-like examples.
Maybe this phrasing of the problem goes too far, and it's only a suspicion: but it almost sounds like 90% of libertarian philosophy would be thrown out of the window if the government phrased its position like, "(1) we own all of this land, we just sublet it to the nominal owners for a rent that we call property tax, (2) you are only allowed to be on our land if you agree to our terms and conditions, which includes laws and income taxes, (3) you may at any time opt to be kicked out of our country permanently, rather than being imprisoned etc."
The difference between the ancap and the ansoc, and the reason that I find the ansoc view really interesting, is that the ansoc feels free to say, "yeah, that's all total crap because the government can't own the land either." By saying that the government obtained its "rule" over the land by being a big bloody bully, and questioning that legitimacy, anarcho-socialism actually has something of a place to stand. But it's about as radical as the Buddhist doctrines of no-self and emptiness, and I'm not sure that such a powerful negation is a wise idea.
Indeed, maybe more weight should be given to opposing such institutions. Though I'm still not convinced that the government should not be fixed first, and indeed I think that it is required to do so to be able to fundamentally affect those govt-like institutions.
I think your policy with stefbot is very healthy.
> ".. who has the monopoly on force, but that's not actually vital to your concerns."
> "...but it almost sounds like 90% of libertarian philosophy would be thrown out of the window if the government phrased its position like, "(1) we own all of this land, we just sublet it to the nominal owners for a rent that we call property tax, (2) you are only allowed to be on our land if you agree to our terms and conditions, which includes laws and income taxes, (3) you may at any time opt to be kicked out of our country permanently, rather than being imprisoned etc.""
This is a great observation, though I do not agree completely. I feel that this applies to ancap very much and the only argument I've heard that could be applied here has been "But it would result in better situation overall if the govt was successfully opposed, even if new ones arise", and that is not very convincing indeed if the resulting situation will fall back to suck (democracy by anarchy as I've heard it called). If someone here is ancap I'm very interested in their response to this.
The reason I do not agree is because there is no real way of you creating your own government/country to compete with the existing ones, for the land area is limited and the governments are asserting that monopoly on force you find non-vital on their respective areas (if they weren't asserting it, how would they exist, thus it is indeed vital by definition). I guess I'm saying that you don't have the right to claim ownership and assert it by force if it makes you immune to competition (also, I now realize, patents). This separates govt-like institutions from governments. Go ahead and pick it apart, please, I just pulled it out of my bag by following my own reasoning.
But indeed, because of discussions like this, my mind might be very different tomorrow.
> "... he seriously constructs a totalitarian government-like dystopia inside of a libertarian minarchy, ..."
Yeah this is something one has to be constantly aware of. And it's actually surprisingly easy to be aware if one has the luxury of having smart people care enough to listen to you, but very hard otherwise. The thing to be aware of is that many have their thoughts about the perfect government, but ultimately you would have to be a totalitarian dictator to actualize them. You forcing people to live in your ideal is fundamentally no better than others doing so. A realization I've seen linked to Voluntaryism, which I feel has similar emptiness you describe with ansoc, but I'm really not knowledgeable enough to say anything of actual value about it.
Following this forward, one ends up in the dilemma, if I oppose government power, how can I uphold belief that I have the right to decide for others? After all changing a government to minarchy would be forcing it's current inhabitants to live in it or move away, and some of them might be democrats who do not want that minarcy of yours. Can I really believe that I have the right to do this?
Either one has to appeal to reasonableness and practicality, and that is very very suspect, much like a big furry frightening monster offering candy, or one turns his/her thoughts on to ancap or ansoc or voluntaryism or something else, all of which have their own problems, some of which were very briefly touched in this discussion. And again we are back in thinking about our ideal world. Frak.
I think we're totally on the same page. Sometimes when I talk about 'fixing the system' by 'reinvigorating our institutions' people will ask "Which institutions?" and one of them is the judicial system.
If you combined the author's idea of everyone requesting jury trials, with a widespread outreach and education about jury nullification, it would be a really interesting thing to watch. When the people were speaking directly through the process as to what they the people felt should be illegal and what wasn't.
Yes it would be chaotic, the question though is if we could exit that chaos into a better place.
If everyone requested jury trials the "chaos" won't be some brilliant revolution, the chaos would be everyone wasting their time on the vast majority of cases that are open-and-shut.
The other thing is that jury nullification isn't a "thing". It's not in the law or in the Constitution. The reason that juries can vote their conscience and nullify is a side effect of the sanctity of a jury trial. Juries can also vote based on the latest baseball game results, if they wanted. And judges absolutely have the right to instruct juries not do do this.
I also think you'll find in practice people tend to support the system. Not everyone lives in your ideological pocket of reality, nor is it necessarily right to imagine they will once they are subjected to "widespread outreach and education". Everyone's got their own pet imaginary revolution and I think part of the reason people live in their own little mainstream-ish bubbles of reality isn't foolishness--it's a defense mechanism against every ideologue demanding their attention.
I think this article's gist is that the American judiciary is leveraged and thus vulnerable to disruption. The solution advocated, loosening laws to decrease case volume, is probably better than the alternative of directing more funding to the courts and prison system.
This systemic leverage pushes the judiciary to do unsavoury things, such as courts increasing penalties for those who choose trial by jury and over-zealous AGs putting elections above fairness.
It may be hyperbole to call shining light on potential civil liberty abuses petty.
>people tend to support the system
As of 2011 the US judiciary stood at 63% approval [1] - this is a good, especially when compared to Congressional approval, but the lowest since 1973. People also tend to pay less attention to the judicial than executive and legislative branches.
Applying the concept of leverage to the legal system is intriguing.
Leverage compels the innocent to plead guilty, and the thought exercise of "crashing the system" will not work because the stakes are too high. There's usually evidence such that a refusal to plead guilty will not affect the outcome very much. Applied to purely innocent suspects, there is no guarantee that refusing to plead will result in a not guilty verdict.
The same sort of problem is present in the investment markets. The fact that something might be over-leveraged as the fundamentals deteriorate does not guarantee profits if you try to short. To quote Keynes, (possibly the one thing he wrote that I whole-heartedly agree with) "Markets can remain irrational far longer than you or I can remain solvent."
It's quite possible that overworked juries and judges would wrongly convict more people by rushing to judgment if they had 10 times the caseload.
Crashing the over-leveraged legal system by flooding it with not guilty pleas may not cause the system to blink; instead, it might cause the courts to degenerate into a Kafkaesque nightmare.
I think he means it the same way: "If everyone wants what you owe them at once, you're hosed." This goes for people buying stocks on margin as well as for the justice system, which in theory owes each defendant a jury trial, but in reality only has enough bandwidth for 10% of them.
> nor is it necessarily right to imagine they will once they are subjected to "widespread outreach and education".
This. Proponents of jury nullification seem to think that a juror needs to have revealed from on high the idea that a jury can decide to flout the law and issue whatever verdict it wants. The reason why juries don't do this isn't because their minds can't conceive of this fact, but because the majority of people understand the importance of rule of law, and that they have a responsibility that extends beyond the scope of the case at hand.
> the majority of people understand the importance of rule of law
But it is precisely because of the importance of the rule of law that the enforcement of unjust laws, or the enforcement of a law that may be broadly just but fails to be so in a particular circumstance, must be resisted.
I don't know that the majority of people have really stopped to reflect on that.
I just read a good book that advocates jury nullification in non-violent drug cases: Let's Get Free, A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice, by former federal prosecutor Paul Butler. In areas hit hard by unjust drug enforcement, it could catch on.
The great thing about jury nullification is that there's no collective action problem. A single juror can make a difference for one case.
So the best approach is probably to pick one vulnerable jurisdiction (with little excess capacity), focus first on jury nullification to reduce the risk of jury trial, then work on reducing plea bargains.
I think it's less conspiratorial than that. One concept the Ayn Rand fans could do better to consider, in both the private and public sphere, is that of "emergent outcomes".
If you're on a jury, are you going to listen when the judge tells you that you have to convict if you conclude that the person charged did in fact have drugs on them? Or are you going to judge the law (one purpose of the jury) as well as the facts, and stand proud and hang the jury if you're unable to convince them the drug war is immoral? Are you willing to lie on the jury questionnaire in order to get on the jury in the first place (since the questionnaire is designed to weed out people who will be immune to the jury tampering judges regularly engage in with their instructions.)
Or do you recognize this as immoral, but still think that the "justice" system itself IS moral because... its the government?
What does law have to do with morality? Laws are rules that we as citizens agree to follow (even if we disagree with them) in an effort to produce a cohesive society. We can seek to get laws we disagree with changed, but you cannot advocate a society in which we follow only the laws we like.
(Unless you are disobeying laws as a form of protest, in which case you accept the punishment. That's how civil disobedience works, you can't skip the punishment because you don't like the law.)
The law being objective does not change the fact that the law is _acting_ in this situation and there is no sense in which the cop can be termed a criminal.
That is to say, a cop on a power trip is legal if he doesn't get caught. It is the _law_ that is on a power trip in that case.
We use the word "illegal" to refer both to things that have been punished and things that could be punished.
When the law is corrupt, nominally illegal things become nebulously legal.
Namely, that government creates crimes to control people, ("There is no way to rule an honest man. The only power government has is over criminals. Thus we create more and more laws until every man is a criminal.")
...and that this control relies on people accepting the easier way out, rather than standing up for their rights. (In Atlas, the alternatives offered the strikers were always easier than striking.)
At the end of the day, the question they both pose is this: If some action really is immoral, is it not immoral for you to support it? If the war on drugs is immoral, is it not immoral for you to pay for it? If you're going to pay your taxes (a practical choice to be sure, even if you feel its immoral) why not match them by supporting organizations working to reform or eliminate the immoral actions those taxes fund? (e.g.: anti-drug war orgs, or a org that underwrites defense attorneys for people charged with drug crimes who want to fight them with a jury trial.)
If you're on a jury, are you going to listen when the judge tells you that you have to convict if you conclude that the person charged did in fact have drugs on them? Or are you going to judge the law (one purpose of the jury) as well as the facts, and stand proud and hang the jury if you're unable to convince them the drug war is immoral? Are you willing to lie on the jury questionnaire in order to get on the jury in the first place (since the questionnaire is designed to weed out people who will be immune to the jury tampering judges regularly engage in with their instructions.)
Or do you recognize this as immoral, but still think that the "justice" system itself IS moral because... its the government?
These are all rhetorical questions. I'm sure my position is obvious by the questions I'm asking, but I'm not looking to debate here, I'm just providing a perspective. And my amusement that the NYT would write a story with such parallels to Atlas Shrugged.
One final parallel is that in Atlas, the system continues to deteriorate, even when most people know its wrong, because most people fool themselves into thinking that injustice is justice. (or are anti-mind, have adopted a philosophy that is against reason.)
So a final question- does an immoral law have any power? Or is it null and void simply because its immoral? (In Maybury v. Madison the supreme court ruled that unconstitutional laws are invalid the day they are signed, no need for supreme court review to invalidate them... yet we had to have a constitutional amendment to create prohibition, but we never had one for the war on drugs...)
If a cop pulls over a driver and then searches his car and finds drugs, and you believe the drug laws are immoral, are you willing to admit that the cop is a criminal? (Or is "just doing your job" an excuse that gets him off the hook?)
If morality is objective, and the "law" he's enforcing is immoral, then the cop is the criminal in this hypothesis. If morality is subjective, then the cop somehow is made moral when doing this, because law somehow conveys morality on otherwise immoral acts. (Again all rhetorical. I'm going to log out now and enjoy my Sunday.)