Blarg: Police already do the same and have historically done the same when it comes to abusing power and operating outside the law. So does government in general. As for ordinary citizenry, the question "What would happen if people started doing it?" fails to be relevant in that particular as well. Do you speed, or jaywalk? Have you ever known anyone to fudge their taxes? Do people start fights, drive drunk, take illegal drugs? Cheat on spouses, abuse children? All these things happen regularly, and citizens need nothing to goad them into doing them. That such things are so much a part of what people naturally and daily do is the reason we need laws in the first place. People are NOT self-regulating to the extent of perfect compliance with either law or morality. Nor are institutions of any stripe, be they private or governmental.

Your "What if?" scenario lacks gravity. You wonder what would happen if people and institutions did what they are already doing all the time, always have been, and always will do. It's overreaching on the part of institutions that inspires people to protest and rebel in the first place.

The question then becomes not whether laws (or morals) hold perfect sway over individuals or society, but whether they are worthy of blind allegiance, in whole or in part, and which ones, and what should be done about it, by who and at what cost, when they are not.

My point that those who most benefit by the status quo are the least likely to object to it is an obvious one and not really up for contention. It is far from being dismissable with offhand snark or reference to how much any one of us might benefit from it at the moment. That's not the point. I'm just saying there is nothing particularly exalted about the status quo. If one must accept as a first principle that the status quo is inherently inviolable and worthwhile, no honest conversation can even be begun.

I'm suggesting instead that the status quo is merely an artifact of its time and quite open to judgment, and that it should be open to change. That idea is inherent in democracy itself. The status quo getting upset and reconfigured once in a while is necessary so our institutions and the inherent injustices institutions attempt to justify in their pursuit of power have a chance to be readjusted and their powers rationalized and curtailed. Protest is serious business inherent to the proper functioning of democracy, not trivial, and if it sometimes causes inconvenience and social disruption -- well, few good things and accomplishments in the political arena do not. Martin Luther King was socially disruptive, and so were abolitionists. Thank goodness they didn't decide to just stay home and pen letters to the editor out of fear of being disruptive and causing inconvenience.