I regularly ignore red lights, drive on the same side of the road as everyone else because it is sensible, have car insurance out of choice but resent the fact that I am forced to, and as for taxes you’ll have to talk to my accountants… Philosophically I have no problem with taxes on money (e.g. income tax) as the government creates the money by printing it, but if I ever run out of money and am forced to sell off any of my property… well that is nothing but theft.
You assume that’s how they would feel. I certainly wouldn’t want unpasteurized eggs, even if they WERE free. And, I’m assuming if you have an entire acre, all you’d need is a permit.
The REASON there are so many laws, boys and girls, is because in the past, people have gone and fucked things up. Think about it. The whole, “falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater”, “your right to swing your fist”, etc)
I disagree with social contract theory: I think it’s pretty bogus. But my reasons for that are irrelevant, because social contract theory is in this case irrelevant. The rule you need to know about here is the Rule of the Gun: the people with the guns make the rules. If you don’t follow the rules, the people with guns will force an unpleasant situation on you, a situation that may range from fines to imprisonment to death, depending on how severe the rule-breaking appears to be to them. (Don’t pay your gas bill because you disagree with it? You’ll be fined. Steal someone’s water heater? You’ll be imprisoned. Draw a gun on a cop? Die, die, die!)
You ask whether a legal defense would be that you didn’t agree to the rules. Lemme ask you: why on earth would the rulemakers put a loophole like that into their rules? They’d have to put it there on purpose. Why would they do it? They don’t give a crap about whether you agreed to the rules, they just want you to follow them. And they have guns.
Follow them or don’t–but the consequence of flouting them is predictable.
Re: the seatbelt law the OP mentions…on paper this is truly one of those “I’m only hurting myself by not wearing it” type of deals, but…is there statistical data that shows something like, say, people that were killed in auto accidents because they weren’t wearing their seatbelts in some way drive up insurance premiums and/or medical costs for the rest of society?
Social contract theory is what people come up with after they decide they don’t morally approve of the rule of the gun. It is agreed to voluntarily by those who form the country or city or whichever is operating under it.
After that it may turn into the rule of the gun over time. The only way to tell is to grab your own guns, draw a line around your property (assuming you own any), and try to secede. That will teach you if you are operating under the social contract theory or the rule of the gun.
Heh–you can also watch other people try. I have yet to see anywhere on earth where someone has tried and succeeded in doing this without facing violence for it. I’d love a cite to contradict me.
You follow the rules because, if nothing else, it is more convenient for you to conform than not to.
Failure to follow the rules can result in:
-social isolation or rejection
-exclusion from activities you may actually want to participate in
-restriction from access to resources or services
-professional or financial loss
-fines or incarcerations
-injury or death
It has little to do with “people with guns enforce the rules”. People who have something you want or need make the rules. If you want my company, you have to follow my rules of not acting like a dickhead or I won’t call you. If you want a job, you need to follow your employers rules or they will fire you. If you want to play on the local softball rec team, you need to follow their rules or they will kick you out. And I haven’t even gotten into rules enforced by people with guns.
If you don’t like the law, you have the same rights as everyone else to vote for representitives to change them or to indulge in peaceful activism.
Quite frankly, the only people who believe they don’t have to follow the rules are psychopaths or 15 year olds.
glee, I did not say I was going to blindly race through a red light, i said slow down considerably and take a real good look, then proceed. The reality is this happens everyday, without incident, maybe not a red light but stopsigns for sure.
I find the idea of debating the issue with someone who isn’t willing to accept that, by smoking for 30 years, let alone having been in the regular presence of second-hand smoke, he has suffered ill consequences pretty silly. What evidence or logic will the original poster accept, if unwilling to accept the truth of the harm of smoking?
At 42, my father was quite fit. Played sports, did whatever he needed. At 65, he had full-blown emphysema. Oxygen tank needed to do more than walk 20 feet. Had to give up golf, because he couldn’t walk from his golf cart, parked next to a green, to where his ball lay on the green without being winded. Smoked for 40 years plus.
You have no idea what damage you have suffered, compared to where you would have been in a smoke-free environment. You have no idea if you’ve suffered damage that you just don’t know about yet. But the evidence says the damage is very likely to be there, and the evidence says that it’s fairly likely that you suffered damage as a child being regularly exposed to second-hand smoke.
But that’s a thread hijack, and I apologize for it.
Sure, but it’s your choice of whether or not you find me sociably acceptable or not, if I don’t like your social rules I can pretty much promise you I won’t be a problem 'cause you won’t see me.
I can tell you from working for large multi-national companies and small ones too, that the rules change abruptly when you are a very valued asset. I am positive that any managers or owners of companies here will tell you that if an employee tries to make their own rules that they are gone. If that employee is the star of their team, and considered critical to the company, slack will be cut. I worked for two huge companies for five years and I’ll tell you from experience that I did not have to follow the company schedule of breaks or dinner or even show up on time, all within reason of course.
Obviously social rules, such as a local softball league, have rules that need to be accepted, but if the rule was " you are not allowed to swing the bat because you may hit the catcher" I think I may have a hard time accepting that, and would swing at the pitch anyway.
I am pretty sure that Rosa Parks was neither of these!
I don’t think he is. He’s saying why should you following the rules when you know you’re right, and they’re wrong. Rosa broke all the rules, and she is an American Icon because of it.
Not exactly: Rosa Parks broke one rule, after preparing extensively for doing so and studying the possible ramifications of doing so, and even then Americans bury her deliberation and pretend she did it out of an emotional response because they’re too uncomfortable with the idea of deliberate rule-breaking. She’s an American icon because she faced down injustice, not because she “broke all the rules.”
