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Do laws protect freedom?

I'm debating this for British Lit. My team has to argue that they don't (although I can use arguments for the other position as well, so I have a better idea of what to expect). The question is the entire prompt; my teacher didn't give us any more details. Thoughts?
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tynamite
tynamite's avatar You need laws when someone walks in your house to steal all your things, but you don't need laws when you walk in a shop and not be allowed to buy alcohol, drugs, knives, fireworks, certain films, have security follow wherever you go hooked up to a national database, and be prohibited from having underage sex, sharing sexual images of yourselves on the internet or going to work as a child, even though it's legal.

One has to make a distinction between laws that are designed to maintain a power balance, and laws that are designed to protect people's welfare.

If you go to a shop and get caught for shoplifting, because you've taken tax dollars from the government, you'll be punished more severely than if you reported your friend stealing from your house, even if you had CCTV cameras too. Steal from the government, and the legal system cares; but steal from a person, and the police don't care. Be racist to a Jew, and you'll go to prison; but be racist to a black person, and the police don't care. Anti Semitic people don't go to prison because they discriminate (which is illegal btw), but instead because they've disrupted the power balance in society, which is to not hamper on successful white people.

It's called divide and rule, and it's also called bread and circuses.

There are laws and bureaucratic regulations which are put in place in today's society, which are designed to keep the working class people down, and have them so accustomed to having no privacy or freedom to behave how they choose, that they are too busy indoctrinated to think about the laws that they follow. This is why they spend their money on rubbish rather than do something productive with it.

Like for example, marriage. Every country in the world promotes marriage and gives tax rebates to couples who are married, in order to incentivise the creation of children and single men having to provide for people. This does not protect your freedom, because Western governments frown upon polygamy or having children out of wed-lock, as it is so socially engrained for us to get married and not do anything else. The country has just stripped people's freedom of being polygamous, for the sake of money.

Governments like to encourage women to stay at home with the kids and not go to work by how they influence us in the media, and only in World War II in a population shortage did they say any different. However it is illegal to discriminate against women applying for jobs, or to ask them if they are pregnant in a job interview. Many governments worldwide legally require employers to give women who get pregnant, maternity leave, which is their full pay for at least 20 weeks of the year whilst the employer finds a temporary replacement. This not only protects the women's freedom of being able to get pregnant without getting fired, but it also makes the employer lose money whilst she is pregnant. As paying two people do to one job harms the economy, the government in this instance is protecting people's freedom.

On the flip side, typing "do women like maternity leave" into Google has the first result from The Guardian being "Do Marissa Mayer's maternity plans make her a fit role model for women?
Yahoo's new CEO is under attack for failing women, by suggesting the impending birth of her child won't stop her doing her job. But would it really harm her career to take a year off?"
I didn't know that women were allowed to take a year off from work for being pregnant. Last time I checked, maternity leave lasted 20 weeks of the year. Considering that the Yahoo! board fired Carol Bartz (business person) and that Yahoo's revenues are always declining, one could argue that maternity leave doesn't protect women's freedom, and that it instead maintains a misogynist culture of protecting the power structure of women. Remember that Marrissa said she would work throughout her weeks of maternity leave, and she is being criticised by women for not taking a year's maternity leave. Is this a standard practise in women's circles? Maybe those women are closet sexists, extremist feminazis, who pretend to be feminists, but really aren't. (Faux feminists.) Feminists (fake or not) like to speak about the patriarchy that holds them back and typecasts them, yet under British law, it is impossible for a woman to be a rapist, and any woman who rapes a man can only be tried for sexual harassment. As we live in a capitalist society and not China, no one person rules the world. The power structures of the world are not black and white. There is no fire this and water that. It's not black and white.

Moving onto domestic abuse, something that can happen in marriage, that would be the act of emotionally or physically harming a spouse so that you have control over them. This is to usually get what you want off them, or to make them do what you want. This would be an act of harming a person, of which there would be no financial transactions taking place or societal structures being affected. In such a closed environment that doesn't affect the vicinity outside the house, it will be interesting to see what stance and legislation, the government would put into place, for such situations.

It is politically incorrect for me to tell you, that the police are typically powerless in the case of handling domestic abuse, especially if they are raped or if there is no physical marks of harm on them. Police have restrictions on how long they can keep someone in prison without charge (48 hours), and in Britain they can only be refused bail if arrested, if their custody officer doesn't defend them. As their bail would be combined with a restraining order lasting up to the date of their trial, proof, testimony and evidence is what factors whether bail is given or not, not an accused person's geographical location to the victim. Also remember that in Britain, only 1 out of 3 rapes women give to the police, do the women decide to press charges for, and how notoriously rape is to prove in court, domestic violence is harder to prove. If the worst comes to the worst, it would more likely be up to a charity to put the woman in a "Woman's Refuge" to move into with her kids, than it would be for the government to do so to and stop the abuser from breaking a door down after the locks have been changed.

So there are laws which are designed to protect people in spite of the absence of money, and sometimes they are justly followed, but not as much as the ones about money are.

If Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) got as much attention as Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PIPA did, the world would be a better place, as we wouldn't need our freedoms protected only when companies' existences are at risk; but people are too focused inwrathed in consumerism, than to consider where the real power comes from.

If people put as much effort into SlutWalk (movement) which had a unified message rather than Occupy Wall Street which had no consensus anarchists, communists and everything inbetween, the world would be a better place.

If people put as much effort into queueing to vote, rather than queueing for the new iPhone and throwing their old one away rather than spend their money on something more productive and less expensive, the world would be a better place.

See also Adisa Nicholson's answer to What are some socially acceptable addictions?

As you're arguing against laws, I can give you examples of laws which are bad.


  • Voter ID
  • CISPA
  • Jaywalking
  • Three Strikes
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What's an assertion, and what should I type in?

Compesh is a question and answer (and debate) website, so before you make a debate, you better learn what an assertion is. I suppose you already know what a question is, and that you've typed it in the box. ;)

An assertion, is basically a statement you can make, that is either true or false.

Richer people have better health.

The question for that would be, Do richer people have better health?

And don't forget to make your assertion, match your question.

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