&gt; Respecting the rule of law is a moral principle.<p>&gt; Morally speaking, the law should be honored<p>Emphatically <i>no</i>; law and morality are two different things, that hopefully correlate, but law does not ever <i>define</i> morality.  (If anything it should be the other way around, but far too often it isn&#x27;t.)<p>&gt; and if it is not a good law, it should be altered through the means provided by the political system.<p>I already explicitly observed one reason why that&#x27;s not always feasible.  Often it takes a fair bit of momentum to get a law changed; momentum needs interested people, and people get a lot more interested when you have a practical demonstration that the law prevents them from getting something they want.<p>Nobody is going to go fight to change regulations to enable a business that doesn&#x27;t exist yet; sometimes they&#x27;ll fight <i>against</i> it because the incumbent has a better media machine and told them to.  Regulations can kill a new business before it ever forms.<p>&gt; Pragmatically speaking, implementing that moral ideal is becoming increasingly difficult, as governments reach farther and farther into daily commerce, become increasingly impenetrable to anyone of ordinary means, and fail to cope with the rapid social changes driven by new technologies.<p>Exactly.  So perhaps you should start by not giving it the benefit of the doubt, not thinking of it as a &quot;moral ideal&quot;, and instead just treating it as something that happens to exist and has various consequences associated with it.<p>There&#x27;s a good reason why most regulations don&#x27;t have particularly severe consequences: half the reason we can deal with the ones we already have is that they aren&#x27;t actually enforced.  Selective enforcement is also a problem, but the solution isn&#x27;t universal enforcement, it&#x27;s repeal.<p>(Also a good lesson for prospective implementers of a system that happens to encode procedures and regulations: if your system doesn&#x27;t have some means for a knowledgeable human to bypass it, it&#x27;s broken, and people will need to find ways to work around it.)