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by logfromblammo 3797 days ago
By the same argument, we could transfer Disney's copyrights and trademarks to Crazy Sven's Discount Intellectual Property Licensing Emporium, and t-shirts featuring Mickey Mouse could be sold at 30% off the previous price.

Why should Disney expect to keep that monopoly privilege and control if the public could still get the same benefit from someone else?

Why should the laws of a mostly free and mostly democratic society matter?

If you're playing a game, with rules, why can't you just help yourself to extra tokens and change the die rolls, and look at other people's cards?

Because the other players will frickin' kill you, that's why, you lowlife cheater. The rules are there so that everyone has a reasonable chance at winning, even in the enhanced-difficulty challenge modes.

For a variety of reasons, some supportable and others abhorrent, the rules-makers decided that unrestricted immigration would someday turn the country into an exploitative, stratified, third-world hellhole. So far, none of their grandkids have had the balls to throw open the gates and fill up their ancestors' neighborhoods with scary brown people with their thick accents and weird foods. Deep down, we're still tribal animals, and the law reflects that.

So the reason is that we follow the law, even if it is stupid, racist, and xenophobic. That's why the citizen gets priority over the foreigner. If you don't like it, you change the law for everyone instead of cheating it just for you.

We know that Disney knows how to lobby for changes in the law. And we know they can get stuff passed that would make ordinary people want to vomit. So why wouldn't they want a new law allowing a specific business category--one so narrow that it could only reasonably refer to Disney and a few other big companies--to import unlimited numbers of foreign workers at below-market wages?

1 comments

"We follow the law, because it is the law" is not a valid response in my humble opinion, because it got us exactly where we are now.
We follow the law not because the law is good, but because people hate cheaters. If it's a crappy law, following it hurts less when everyone is equally exposed to its crappiness. What we hate most of all is when someone blatantly, obviously cheats and gets away with it.

It isn't about the law being the law, but everyone being equal before it.

Besides that, a bad law can be changed to be better (in theory). We can do that via the sanctioned legislative process, or through mass civil disobedience.

These companies that are cheating various provisions of immigration law aren't doing it as a protest, but as a means to make a quick buck from a bunch of people who can't effectively seek redress.