This brings up a particularly
anti-human result of the statist's philosophy. Do the murderers and rapists
believe in an obligation to obey the "law"? Obviously not, since they disobey
it. They only fear the consequences of getting caught. So only the generally
good (albeit deluded) people really care if something is "law." And since the
good people would already support justified defensive force, the only thing the
"law" changes is that otherwise good people then also start to support unjust
force. I sometimes ask, "When the law is wrong, what should happen to those who
disobey it?" The authoritarian tries to avoid answering, at first. He will say
something irrelevant about writing to congress and changing the law (as if
individual citizens could actually change what congress commands them to do. If
the authoritarian respects the law so much, and congress' right to create it,
why would he disagree with it enough to want to change it in the first place?).
When pressed, he will say the absurd thing, out of his conditioned belief in the
inherent righteousness of the law. He will say, "They should suffer the
consequences." That is, they should be put in jail. Instead of pointing out how
idiotic that is, I follow up with, "And what should happen to those who enforce
such a wrong law?" They almost always say, "Nothing."
So, from the authoritarian's
conditioned response we see in his philosophy the absurd result that people who
do the right thing should be locked up, and people doing the wrong thing should
run free- which is why that so often happens in politics.