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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

There is a happy medium here: stop using the government to jail non-violent offenders.

If someone orders a drink with too much sugar, doesn't want to pay a 38% tax rate, or put solar cells in their yard without permission, wants to smoke a certain plant, just let them.

We spend extensive police resources jailing these people. If we use a society agreed to just leave people alone for stuff that doesn't matter, when the government is conducting an operation like this it'd be a little easier to let it go as there is no target for abuse.

Right now we're training in the opposite direction where everything that upsets someone needs a law and needs to be illegal.

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Where does this idea that all law is enforced by police come from? Why is it so prevalent on HN?

Because it is: it's either enforced by the police, or by some other group that will fall back to calling the police if you don't go along with their enforcement.

That's unequivocally false.

For example: there are many legal concepts which are not a crime to disobey (and therefore there is no criminal reason for police to be involved) and/or it is not in the jurisdiction of any police force.

Possibly that's true in the US, but it's completely false in many other parts of the world.

In England there's a bunch of stuff that has no police involvement. Debt or tenancy are the two biggest areas.

If there’s no force behind the law then it’s just a suggestion

Not all legal constructs are practical, possible, or necessary to be enforced. And even for those that are enforced, not all necessarily need to be enforced by physical force.

> orders a drink with too much sugar, doesn't want to pay a 38% tax rate, or put solar cells in their yard without permission, wants to smoke a certain plant, just let them.

I would walk back here and say one of these is not like the other insofaras 'let them be' and the wider effects on society.

I think you should read up on the differences between civil law and criminal law.

"Counterterrorism" implies to me that the targets were not under the jurisdiction of the United States, and therefore could not have been jailed for ordering a drink with too much sugar (not that anyone in the US could, either, but let's pretend they could).

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