[karmacondon]

People who break the law are criminals, period. It doesn't matter if the law is just or unjust, or whether or not you personally agree with it. The simple fact is that the majority of citizens don't want online drug dealing to be legal, so it isn't legal.

Equating drug dealers with Ghandi, MLK and the US Founding Fathers is a stretch at the least and outright offensive at worst. These people aren't making bold political statements. They're selling drugs.

If you think that drugs should be legal, convince your fellow citizens to vote to make them legal. MLK, Gandhi and the Founding Fathers did what was necessary to change laws that they felt were unjust. Criminal behavior isn't the same thing as civil disobedience, and there are no shortcuts.

[dllthomas]

People who break the law are "criminals, period" only in the most uninteresting sense. I certainly would not make any claim that most drug dealers are acting in political protest - I don't know enough to say, and would be unsurprised if the overwhelming majority had purely a narrow profit motive; but I do want to raise the issue that breaking laws is often a powerful part of convincing our fellow citizens to change them. MLK very specifically argued that it is our moral responsibility not to obey an unjust law.

[vacri]

The simple fact is that the majority of citizens don't want online drug dealing to be legal, so it isn't legal.

Last I saw, several US states were legalising marijuana sales. It seems that attitudes are shifting.

Your statement is also simplistic: a majority of citizens don't care one way or the other about catching undersized lobsters, yet it's illegal. Trademark infringement is another such law. Then there are laws that the public kind've want but the people in power don't, so they don't get made (eg protection for whistleblowers). The simplest counterexample is tax law. Taxes are incredibly unpopular, yet laws requiring taxes exist.

The genesis of laws is a lot more complex than magically popping in and out of existence with popular demand.

[jstx]

"If you think that drugs should be legal, convince your fellow citizens to vote to make them legal."

The burden of enlightening someone should never fall upon anyone but that someone. To argue that avoiding imprisonment isn't a burden would be the definition of sophism.

[FireBeyond]

To claim that people who are actively hiding their identities, deny, destroy evidence, pass blame, abrogate responsibility - and make sometimes millions of dollars tax-free by doing so are just revolutionaries for the progression and advancement of our society is ... disingenuous at best.

[CyberDildonics]

No one has claimed they are 'just' revolutionaries. The founders of the US wanted to stop paying as much in tax. In the process they set up the most decentralized system of their time.

[dragonwriter]

The level of taxation was not a central concern of the founders, nor was the US system any more decentralized than, say, the Holy Roman Empire.

[CyberDildonics]

States rights, separation of justice, executive, and legislative branch, equal senators per state, congress numbers by population, no central bank, right to bear arms, jury of your peers...

These are all decentralization of power. The Roman empire had an emperor.

[dragonwriter]

The Holy Roman Empire is a different institution than the Roman Empire; it had an official with the title "emporer" but it also featured rather extreme decentralization of power. And it existed at the same time as the early US. In some respects, it was the direct model for the decentralization in the US system.

Also, "no central bank" wasn't domething that made the US decentralized compared to other contemporary systems. First, because central banks were extremely rare at the time, and second because the central banks of the time, and most modern ones, are a means of transferring power out of the government to private capitalists, so they further decentralize government power.

Neither was retaining the British jury system.