Does Entrapment Really Make Good People Do Bad Things?
Posted by freedomforall 7 years, 6 months ago to Philosophy
Excerpt:
"Let's look at the federal side of it. Due to the rules they've put into place, undercover work and entrapment are bread and butter for their investigations. You can complain about it, rail against it, point out the shady nature of it but hey, that's the game. The choices are simple: 1) play the game, 2) change the game, or 3) refuse to be part of the game. That's it. You don't get to dictate the terms, the players' actions, or the ways that the rules change after you start playing. You definitely don't get to stop the game if your opponent starts cheating---and they do cheat in every way possible. So your only options are to play with the current rules, change the game on them, or not even get involved.
If you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. "
"Let's look at the federal side of it. Due to the rules they've put into place, undercover work and entrapment are bread and butter for their investigations. You can complain about it, rail against it, point out the shady nature of it but hey, that's the game. The choices are simple: 1) play the game, 2) change the game, or 3) refuse to be part of the game. That's it. You don't get to dictate the terms, the players' actions, or the ways that the rules change after you start playing. You definitely don't get to stop the game if your opponent starts cheating---and they do cheat in every way possible. So your only options are to play with the current rules, change the game on them, or not even get involved.
If you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. "
The government knows no moral restraints. We must know none in defending our freedom against their actions.
Your successful entrapment and perhaps lifelong ruination is but a feather in some government worker's war bonnet. You are his step closer to a raise and/or even promotion.
Conviction seems to be based on how things "look" more than what actually happened also. Government people are expert at making things look bad- example if you are carrying $15k in cash when you fly. They make it look like you made the money in some illegal activity.
Very scary prognosis for the country. How would we ever get control over the excesses of government with a majority of the citizens thinking like this.
If, in order to get what you want, you have to disregard all the negatives that come with it rationality disappears.
"There's a sucker born every minute." -- P. T. Barnum
"You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." -- Abraham Lincoln
People can be made to do things against their own better judgment or will through emotional manipulation, guilt, blackmail, the promise of something for nothing, or even misplaced good intentions. At the extreme it will cost them their lives, as with martyrs for a cause. Why can't people remember to "just say no"?
I told a few friends that I thought everyone could be corrupted, given the proper motivation. One of them, a barrister, said he couldn't be. I asked how he would respond if someone with power and connections asked him for a less than legal favor and simultaneously "offered" to help his daughter's career, and could also blackball that daughter if he refused to provide the favor. He didn't answer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VrFV...
The Ruby Ridge incident was a classic case, with the BATF and FBI badgering a gunsmith into making a shotgun barrel that was short enough to be changed into a "sawed off" configuration. The tragic fiasco that followed, with the deaths of an agent and an innocent young mother was the result of this stupidity.
Entrapment often involves a friend or relative who's been threatened with legal action by a government agency, and are forced to cooperate in the entrapment. Money laundering by complex transactions may not be obviously illegal to the entrapped party, as one example.
While the target of entrapment is usually already a person with an inclination toward illegal activity, it is possible to entrap people with good intentions.
This article seems to be written from the perspective of someone involved with groups who think some kind of violent direct action against the gov't is a good idea. That's so far from my world. I actually forget such people really exist. I can kind of put myself in the author's mindset though by thinking he just has a very different threshold line between what constitutes light and transient causes and what is a long train of abuses. To me we're not even close, esp when we account for all the things that have gotten better for liberty against things that have gotten worse. From my point of view violent action is just crazy talk. It's a weird glimpse into another world.
Gov't should get out of the business of encouraging crime.
This has been a sad fact of life throughout human history until the industrial revolution. I think this is why the world's religion say interest is evil and good people share. They were written in a time when people couldn't conceive of someone borrowing money, creating a good return for the lender, good wealth for himself, and good/services for customers that wouldn't have existed otherwise. If history shows it takes a few hundred years for the economic, political, and moral values to catch up, that's not all that bad.
I think you're saying too few people know where value comes from, and I'm saying too few people know, but more people know than in the past. I think it's a glass half empty / half full thing.