It's the Floyd Ferris thing from Atlas Shrugged. They don't make laws because they want you to follow them. They make laws so that you break them, and then they have grounds to control you. They just don't do it in a mean way 100% of the time. Yet.
Nailed it. I may steal that entire post are re-post it some day, several some days.
Which is why I maintain that there really are few law-abiding citizens just many peaceable ones....at the moment.
ClearCase_guy: “They make laws so that you break them, and then they have grounds to control you.”
Some people want laws broken for monetary (red light camera fines, asset forfeiture in drug cases, etc) or other reasons, but it seems highly improbable that that is the primary motive for most law. It seems far more likely that most laws are simply meant to control people and are not specifically designed to create lawbreakers. However, laws that create perverse incentives, like the ones I mentioned above, do deserve extra scrutiny. For example, I think asset forfeiture laws violate private property protections in the US Constitution.