Lee Schafer opines in the StarTribune on the inexplicable behavior of Jim Surdyk in breaking the law concerning Sunday liquor sales, and in the process manages to bring President Trump into it:
The rule of law takes a beating in this kind of political environment, too. It’s particularly telling that one in four respondents in a February survey said President Donald Trump should be able to overturn a judge’s decision if he happened to disagree with it.
Our new president isn’t exactly a staunch defender of our traditional sense of the rule of law, of course. He has done things like complaining that our laws forbidding Americans to bribe people when doing business abroad are “horrible” and criticizing a “so-called judge” for taking “law enforcement away from our country.”
Yet this is an issue that seems to have partisans on both sides with blind spots, and critics of the president seem to have a cart-and-horse problem when discussing issues like a perceived threat to our rule of law. It seems far more accurate to call his election as president a result of what’s been happening in our culture, not the cause of it.
Meanwhile, over at The Minnesota Skinny, Frank (I think) also drags President Trump into the Surdyk fray as he defends the opening of the Surdyk’s liquor store.:
It might not have been the right thing, it might not have been the fair thing, but the numbers may one day reveal a risk that produced value despite the penalty. For a similar example, we can look toward the White House.
We still haven’t seen Donald Trump’s tax returns, and you know what? We’re never going to. Never ever ever. No stupid petition you sign on the Internet is going to get those books open. Bernie Sanders might as well shout into a seashell. Trump was supposed to open the books during his campaign, wasn’t he? I’ve no doubt the contents of those returns would have him removed from the White House, but nobody can make him produce them. So, he didn’t. He was lambasted, he’s still being lambasted, but it didn’t stop him from getting elected. Nobody could punish him then, and sure as hell nobody can punish him now.
Frank looks at the law as simply part of the risk equation of life, while Lee is looking at the law as a more sacred part of society, the part that helps us get along with each other. Honestly, while Frank’s view has a certain hipster appeal to it, it’s the sort of approach that only works so long as a small fraction of society is doing it. What happens if everyone decides to drive faster than everyone else? We end up with pileups worth of a Formula 1 race. Robbing banks? We can tolerate that until everyone’s robbing a bank. Frank’s approach is the parasite’s approach, the approach that seems to yield great results – but, to lapse into software engineering patois, it has no scalability.
And, of course, it suffers from the ethical lapse of the end justifies the means.
Getting back to Surdyk and his liquor store for a moment, I’ll just state right now that, for the next couple of years, my wife and I will not be visiting Surdyk’s for any of his products. Sure, this is symbolic – we go through maybe 5 bottles of wine a year, mostly for cooking, and there are wine shops much closer than Surdyk’s. But we have visited there in the past, as they have a better selection than most places, and the smell of the cheese shop is quite heavenly.
But we’re going to take a skip. His lack of respect for society is repugnant.
