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An evil government is not going to obey the laws anyway, so might as well make the well meaning government more effective to prevent the other one.

by fooker 3y ago

atoav 3y ago
Historically there are not many instances of this happening tho, unless we are speaking of truly absolute majorities that follow already dictatoric governments. Evil governments have it very easy if the laws they encounter when they get into office are ones that are practical for evil governments. Even the actual Nazis had to fake a reason for why they need to abolish democracy ("Reichstagsbrand"). The reason why they could do that were laws. Laws that might have looked okay in democratic times. When you have a healthy, strong democracy your division of powers and opposition should be able to hold off a evil government for enough time voters can vote them out again. That is a core idea of democracy and the reason why there are the different branches. Now your governments can create/modify/remove laws in a way that weakens that division between the branches and makes it easier for evil government to remove their opposition, influence the justice system and command the military to break their oaths etc. Our task during non-evil governments is to avoid accidentally weakening those defenses.
- fooker 3y ago
  Your perspective of history seems limited to the current first world countries. Governments in Asia, Africa, and South America routinely ignore laws for petty reasons.
  - atoav 3y ago
    Yeah, that means you didn't have the proper seperation of powers to begin with, which was kinda the point of my argument. If you're down that road and eroded that seperation, getting that thing back into the bottle is really hard without revolutions or massive public uproar. If you never had that seperation to begin with, even worse. TL;DR: evil governments can ignore laws if the justice system is not independent. Hence the inportance of keeping it independent.

An evil government is not going to obey the laws anyway, so might as well make the well meaning government more effective to prevent the other one.

by fooker 3y ago

An evil government is not going to obey the laws anyway, so might as well make the well meaning government more effective to prevent the other one.

atoav 3y ago

Historically there are not many instances of this happening tho, unless we are speaking of truly absolute majorities that follow already dictatoric governments. Evil governments have it very easy if the laws they encounter when they get into office are ones that are practical for evil governments. Even the actual Nazis had to fake a reason for why they need to abolish democracy ("Reichstagsbrand"). The reason why they could do that were laws. Laws that might have looked okay in democratic times. When you have a healthy, strong democracy your division of powers and opposition should be able to hold off a evil government for enough time voters can vote them out again. That is a core idea of democracy and the reason why there are the different branches. Now your governments can create/modify/remove laws in a way that weakens that division between the branches and makes it easier for evil government to remove their opposition, influence the justice system and command the military to break their oaths etc. Our task during non-evil governments is to avoid accidentally weakening those defenses.

fooker 3y ago
Your perspective of history seems limited to the current first world countries. Governments in Asia, Africa, and South America routinely ignore laws for petty reasons.
- atoav 3y ago
  Yeah, that means you didn't have the proper seperation of powers to begin with, which was kinda the point of my argument. If you're down that road and eroded that seperation, getting that thing back into the bottle is really hard without revolutions or massive public uproar. If you never had that seperation to begin with, even worse. TL;DR: evil governments can ignore laws if the justice system is not independent. Hence the inportance of keeping it independent.