Hacker News Reader

Comment by gcv | Hacker News Reader

Constitutions are wonderful things, and they can help set the tone of a nation. Yet, everything comes down to the people: the rulers and the public. As long as the rulers behave decently, things work well. When they don't, things fall apart. The Soviet Union had the most democratic constitution ever — and it meant nothing. The people "in charge" in the US have decided to behave like swine, on everything from ignoring swathes of the Bill of Rights to not talking to each other about policy. No amount of Constitutional rewriting will help with that.

To use an analogy near and dear to the HN readership: you can use the best language, framework, and source control system, but that won't help if you have incompetent programmers who do not communicate.

View on HN

> The Soviet Union had the most democratic constitution ever — and it meant nothing.

That's a popular statement, but its not really all that true. The Soviet Union had a Constitution with a very broad and progressive set of basic guarantees -- but also a very authoritarian set of limitations to those guarantees written directly into it.

E.g., in the 1977 Constitution, Article 39 states, in relevant part, "Enjoyment by citizens of their rights and freedoms must not be to the detriment of the interests of society or the state, or infringe the rights of other citizens" while Article 59 states, in full:

Citizens' exercise of their rights and freedoms is inseparable from the performance of their duties and obligations.

Citizens of the USSR are obliged to observe the Constitution of the USSR and Soviet laws, comply with the standards of socialist conduct, and uphold the honour and dignity of Soviet citizenship.

And Articles 60 through 69 detail Constitutional duties, of citizens starting with, in Article 60:

It is the duty of, and matter of honour for, every able-bodied citizen of the USSR to work conscientiously in his chosen, socially useful occupation, and strictly to observe labour discipline. Evasion of socially useful work is incompatible with the principles of socialist society.

People who say that the Soviet Union had a model Constitution that was just ignored in practice probably haven't actually read the Constitution they are talking about. Or at least, I hope they haven't.

Oh, c'mon - you're almost there. Your analogy is begging you to take it a step further. Law, code. How good are human beings at writing massive rules-systems which avoid conflicting logic?

Not sure what amuses me more. The notion of citizen as end user, or the notion of lawyer as API consumer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com