Laws and morals

Some commenters were shocked that I consider breaking the law an option for poor people. They considered it some line never to be crossed. After all these laws protect such morally unquestionable rights as the right to live, be unharmed and holding your property. How could anyone near any moral say anything against them?

Well, could you imagine to join a society, where killing innocents for bounty is the common form of income? Would you go out with your friends every week, invading innocents homes, murdering them, dancing on their corpses and take their belongings?

Would you do it if it would be the only way to get food?

No. You already do it just for fun.

You play World of Warcraft, so you willingly take part of a world where the proper way of getting stuff is killing its owner. And you don't just kill for survival. You could level without killing anything. And after top level, you could do anything without killing. You don't have bills to pay.

"They are evil" you may say, but on what ground? Some NPCs said so? They are lying! No dungeon mob ever left its dungeon. None of them invaded your towns. None of them attacked you unless you invaded their dungeon with the obvious intent to slaughter them and take their belongings. You also torture them, or kidnap their children if you are properly paid. Some morals you have!

What? These are the laws of the game? Of course they are and that's the point. Laws have nothing to do with moral. They have everything to do with power.

Laws are set by someone or group who have the power to set them. Sooner or later most people will find them moral, as they want to believe that the world is just. But that's irrelevant. Even if everyone would know that they are immoral, that would make no difference. Laws stay until someone changes them.

Two kind of people break laws: the powerful and the stupid.

When the lawmaker group still have the formal position but no longer the power to enforce the rules, those who are without position but with power will overthrone them. That happened in the French Revolution or in the American Independence War. These cases are called revolution because the new power group took formal positions acknowledged by other parties.

If you are a successful person, you have power yourself. You can be a member of the powerful group. For example you can be a highly ranked and payed soldier of a dictator. In a democratic countries you can vote on the election. Such systems exists for one reason: they are more powerful than their alternatives. The voting free citizens create more resources, more innovative than a bunch of slaves who work only in fear of punishment. The production of the free country is larger than the production of a non-free, so it will win over it, just like it happened in the Cold War against the communists. The dictatorship is more effective than the tribal anarchy, so it will win over it as we can see all over Africa and Middle-Asia.

Am I one of these powerful people? Yes, as I am a voting citizen of a democratic country.
Do I break laws? Why would I? They are mostly my laws. They are created by my group in order to create an environment where we can flourish. It allows taking the money of the idiots by trading but disallow taking my money by robbery. I love most of the system, why would I break it?

I don't love the system completely, for example I hate to pay tax (because it's mostly welfare. I wouldn't mind paying for government services like roads and military). However I'm fully aware that the welfare exists not because of some evil conspiration, but because a big part of my group supports welfare. They have more power than me, so they can force me to pay tax. While I could try to cheat tax, I don't do, simply because it's too risky. I can do two things, and doing both:

• trying to shift power from the socialist to the capitalist subgroup of my group by persuading people to "M&S does not deserve help".
• playing the system, by working much less than I could, since the tax is progressive. If I work half, I get half payment, but my tax is cut by 65%. I spend the other half-time with hobby and tax-free work (fixing my own car, painting my own wall, cutting my own lawn).

The other law-brakers are morons. People who cannot evaluate power and believe that a gun or a knife makes them powerful. They are incapable to see the system, they believe they are 1 vs 1 with their victim. No, it's him vs victim+cops. In extraordinary cases, he can win, typically if the victim is especially weak but have especially lot of resources. The guy who walks alone with stacks of money in his pockets or the guy with million dollars paintings in his unguarded home will be robbed. Ordinary guys are only robbed by idiots who are either killed on the site by the self-defending "victim", or captured later by the cops. He loses not because he is "evil" or "immoral" but simply because he is weak. He is usually a drunken homeless or a young gangster from a non-functional family. They are way too dumb to find a decent job, how could they beat the system?


There is a third group: the whiners. They don't have power, want some and believe that whining about "right and wrong" will make difference. It doesn't.


So we have:

• people with formal and real power: the leading group
• people with formal but no real power: the leading group that will lose his position soon (maybe with his life)
  
• people with no formal but with real power: revolutioners, soon to be leading group
• people with no formal and real power who accept their situation: underclass
• people with no formal and real power who try to change it: lowly criminals who get caught
• people with no formal and real power who do nothing but ask for power: whiners, "1 G pls" morons

These are the clean classes but the world is never black and white and in the gray area is the chances that the poor "no formal power" people can take. The grey area is formed when the people with formal power have some real power but also the ones with no formal power.

The Pirates of Somalia is one perfect example. The Western World has formal power over the seas. They can tax shipping companies, Somalis cannot. However they don't have enough power to secure the Somali seas, so the pirates with guns (=power) can tax ships if they are lucky. On the other hand they don't have enough power to officially control the zone, setting up internationally acknowledged shipping tax, since their "navy" would surely lose a direct battle against Western warships. Such situation creates a divided-power situation where subjects (the ship-owners) can choose to pay both, or trust in luck that they can evade one of them.

Since there is no "set way", you can have many options to be successful. You can be a pirate, you can provide services for pirates, you can spy on the pirates for the ship-owners or the Westerns. Notice that out of these opportunities, only the naval spy are "legal" as the other sides lack the formal power to give you such status.

Other grey situation is where the formal power group have real power over most fields but not all. However for moral reasons (=whining) they don't acknowledge the limitations of their power. While overthroning them is impossible, "locally overthroning" them is. For example the "decent gentlemen" find gambling, drugs and prostitution "immoral". They lack the real interest to stop them (why should I care if some idiot wastes his money or health on these). They could be stopped if every building would have spy-cameras and every people would have blood test every week. Do we have such power? No. Do we really want to have it? No.

The honest thing to do would be to acknowledge our lack of power to stop them. The smart thing would be to incorporate them into our system, just like the smart kings shared their power with the upcoming citizen class to prevent revolutions, forming constitutional monarchies. We could make them pay our tax. But instead, listening to our whining members we formally ban them. Of course it won't stop them from existing. Since everything needs government, a "crime organization" is immediately formed to do the job. The situation is similar to Somalia, as both the bruisers of the mafia and the cops of the official authority have power. Someone can find his living in these grey areas as worker in the "forbidden" industries. You can join the "crime" organization, you can provide services for them and you can spy on them. These are not my dream jobs, but they are jobs.

Finally: back to moral. As we already saw, moral has nothing to do with laws, just power. After all, the Nazis were anything but moral, still they could gain formal power in most of Europe and set the most immoral laws ever. They were followed still (except for a few "criminals"). However there is some kind of "natural moral" that says that a system built on 0 sum games cannot last forever as no one is motivated to produce anything.

The grey jobs mentioned above are not simple wealth redistribution actions like robbing or taxation. There is work done (drug created, illegal casino run, sexual action of the prostitute), so it's an industry. Ugly one, in some countries illegal one, but still.