[pmiller2]

> Law is primarily about voluntary submission, not power.

Let me know how that works out for you, k? I can assure you that although state power ultimately comes from the people, the state most definitely will enforce its laws against you, should you break them. That is, unless you're rich and powerful enough to afford the best lawyers and a handful of legislators.

[SR2Z]

The state is rarely capable of enforcing the law on more than a small minority of lawbreakers because enforcing the law is expensive.

If there's a busy road where people are routinely speeding, the state is actually incapable of pulling every single speeder over and ticketing them. Instead, the state relies on setting reasonable speed limits and scaring drivers with the prospect of fines.

This isn't a personal philosophy as much as it is a statement of truth: it's really expensive to enforce laws.

[kingsuper20]

>The state is rarely capable of enforcing the law on more than a small minority of lawbreakers

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ― A.I. Solzhenitsyn

[reader_mode]

>the state is actually incapable of pulling every single speeder over and ticketing them.

a) technology exists where you can just record license plates and send speeding tickets automatically - which is a nice prallel for mass surveilance tech - it makes large scale enforcement much cheaper

b) you don't really need to enforce on everyone, a high deterrant + random enforcement creates strong incentives against doing something (ie. making examples)

[pmiller2]

You don't think selective enforcement is about exertion of power?

[enraged_camel]

>> The state is rarely capable of enforcing the law on more than a small minority of lawbreakers because enforcing the law is expensive.

This makes no difference because nobody wants to play Russian roulette with regards to risking whether the state will come after them.

Indeed, the state’s power comes from this threat of force application.

[alisonkisk]

We now have speed cameras and semi automatic citations.

[sudosysgen]

The state is definitely capable of detecting every single speeder and sending them a ticket. You just need some smart centralization, wire traffic cameras and doppler radars on every corner, program tracking algorithms and decode the license plates to match them with the owner and record a fine.

It chooses not to.

[throwawaygh]

> It chooses not to.

Sometimes it does, which provides an interesting case study that proves slibhb's point -- "A law that is followed only as long as it is enforced is not much of a law and is unlikely to last."

One example is a portion of interstate near the St. Louis airport that runs through St. Ann, MO. (right next to Ferguson, MO), which resulted in changes to state law [1].

Many other munis in that region -- most notably Ferguson -- went far beyond strips of interstate and handed out fines as abundantly as possible, enforcing every law with an iron fist. And then the whole area exploded into chaos, reverberating out of the local community and, over a period of years, boiled over in dozens of communities.

You can rule with an iron fist. Until you can't.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/st-louis-county-municipal-cou...

[shkkmo]

It may have been a bit overstated, but the core point is solid.

One of the main reasons the war on drugs failed is a lack of voluntary submission. Pure enforcement, even with the progressive strengthing of enforcement powers, was simply unable to stop drugs being widely available in the USA.

Our society runs on trust and voluntary submission to the rule of law. If either of those went away in a signifant fashion, the our legal system and society in general would cease to function in it's current form.

[pmiller2]

Except you have it backwards. The "War on Drugs" came about as a way for the state to exert power over youth and minorities.

> “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

> “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...

From that perspective, the drug war makes perfect sense, and was a spectacular success, not in terms of submission, but in terms of control.

[anaerobicover]

The original publication was at Harper's Magazine, not CNN, but this infamous quotation has dubious provenance and veracity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman#Drug_war_quote

[monocasa]

I'm not sure I'd accept the family's statement at face value. In fact that's the statement I'd expect out of them completely orthogonally to it's veracity.

Additionally I don't find the subsequent argument compelling. 'Sure Nixon hated hippies and blacks, but it wasn't an effective policy until workshopped by subsequent presidents, so targetting those groups couldn't have been the point" doesn't really hold a lot of weight for me.

On top of all of that, corroborating quotes seem to keep being removed from that wikipage, with an edit note that doesn't match the edit, pointing to brigading.

[anaerobicover]

Interesting, would you mind to point to one of such edit you mention? I cannot see to what you refer. I see removal of newsmax URL few times, however that linked article is not supporting of Harper's original as I read. Perhaps I am not viewing enough backwards in history.

[pmiller2]

I don't see what's dubious about it. There doesn't seem to be any evidence the quote was fabricated, and the effects of US drug policy are apparent to anyone who lifts their head out of the sand.

You don't think Nixon could have disliked blacks, hippies, and drugs, and just found a convenient way to tie them all together while at the same time being able to say "think of the children?" Nixon was many things, but dumb and politically naive are not among them.

[dylan604]

>Let me know how that works out for you, k?

"voluntary submission" sounds like people that walk around claiming to be a sovereign citizen thereby exempt from "laws". i always find it funny that the ones screaming this the loudest are usually in the midst of some sort of legal troubles.

[slibhb]

Though you seem to think otherwise, nothing in your post contradicts anything I wrote.