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A comment on Grateful Dead Fan Timothy Tyler Has Been Granted Clemency. Parent comment

Re:Grateful Dead Fan Timothy Tyler Has Been Granted Clemency by dragonwriter on Wednesday August 31, 2016 @12:33PM (#12399544)
> No.... it's a constitutionally limited democratic republic. That's supposed to prevent "the majority of the voting public" from mandating stupid laws and forcing the minority to live under them.

No, its supposed to stop the majority of the voting public from mandating laws that violate essential liberty and forcing the minority to live under them.

Its not supposed to stop the majority of the voting public from mandating stupid laws, though of course one hopes that stupid laws would, if they fail to be recognized as such before passage, be corrected in short order most of the time.

Though experience would, perhaps, show that to be overly optimistic.

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Re:Grateful Dead Fan Timothy Tyler Has Been Granted Clemency by logfromblammo on Wednesday August 31, 2016 @01:24PM (#12399956)
It would seem that the issue in dispute is whether a law can be stupid without also violating essential liberty in some way.

I think we can agree that all laws that violate essential liberty are intrinsically stupid.

Let's not examine it too closely, though, lest we uncover that republics may, in fact, be designed to protect the privileges of the land-owning elites from the sheer numbers of the unwashed rabble, and the defense of their essential liberties may only be a beneficial side effect.

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