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> Your comment does not address the basic problem with a legislative implementation of freedom: it is undemocratic because the power to fight legal battles will
by twhb 6y ago
> Your comment does not address the basic problem with a legislative implementation of freedom: it is undemocratic because the power to fight legal battles will always be constrained by money, therefore giving more weight to those that have more.
Yes, my comment did not address the US legal system’s wealth bias, except to say that if it needs solving then all citizens should benefit from the solution, not just one class. So I’m not sure why you’re painting me as having one view or another on the solution. What I attacked was different laws for different people. Am I to understand that you believe legal classes are necessary to solve wealth bias? Could you explain the link to me?
> the power to fight legal battles will always be constrained by money
In the US, under our current system. It’s not a result of democracy, it’s a result of a largely privatized legal system.
Also, what exactly are you arguing here? That the power to fight legal battles is bad?
> That makes the legislative or libertarian version of freedom undemocratic.
Dictatorship is undemocratic. Biased legal systems are flawed, maybe unfair, not undemocratic.
Again, I fail to see what this has to do with qualified immunity, or how qualified immunity is more democratic.
> Naturally, if you have the means, that may seem inefficient, but then that was never the point of democracy, and as far as I am concerned, must never be the point of freedom either.
I haven’t said a word about inefficiency.
- brnt 6y agoNowhere did I bring up different laws for difference classes. What I was addressing was that the courts are perhaps not the way one should be supposed to handle the liability of persons in the government. How it should work is that we make and hold elected officials accountable through a functioning democratic process. Biased legal systems are biased towards the affluent. That is an uncontested tell for problematic democratic legitimacy. Because it's difficult to remove that bias entirely, qualified immunity is a tool to defend from wealthy parties. I made the link to libertarianism because this is a stated goal in most of their thinking: courts over democracy, and it's up to you to be able to afford it. Affiliated think tanks are quite lucid as to why [1]: precisely because it stacks the system in favor of the affluent. And that is thus precisely why I'm against any move in the direction of a litigious society, even though I can imagine and recall cases where I'd certainly like to. [1] Some thinking from these property rights supremacists (read: unapologetic in their favoring of 'freedom' over democracy): https://fee.org/articles/freedom-and-democracy-are-different/ https://fee.org/articles/freedom-and-democracy-are-different...