Conditional Suffrage?

[Warik]

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Drug dealers commit illegal acts, which is not the same as committing crimes. Do you see the difference?

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No.

Neither does Webster: an act or the commission of an act that is forbidden or the omission of a duty that is commanded by a public law and that makes the offender liable to punishment by that law

What's the difference?

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The act they are imprisoned for - trading some chemicals or some plants for some money - is a voluntary exchange of private property between two consenting adults. What could possibly be criminal about that? The only reason it's illegal is because imprisoning these people achieves some political goal.

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So is a terrorist buying a privately owned nuclear bomb from an insane dictator.

Or a 19 year-old kid buying some grenades and an assault rifle from some dude in a dark alley.

"What could possibly be criminal about that? The only reason it's illegal is because imprisoning these people achieves some political goal." It's not like they're hurting anybody.

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Thank you for pointing out one of the big problems in our particular implementation of representative democracy. You can replace drug legalization for any "swing issue" and see why this system produces consistently crappy results.

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Perhaps if our representatives were selected by more competent individuals, we could take a big step towards improving our system of representative democracy.

Taking the sheep out of the equation would also take the dominance of the two party system out of the equation and give us better choices for representatives, governors, presidents, etc...