<i>&gt; We evidently wanted a system where no state actor ever faces punishment for any decision they make</i><p>Exactly--which means those actors are not exercising &quot;naked personal power&quot;; they are exercising the power as state actors that <i>we gave to them</i>. So if we don&#x27;t like what they&#x27;re doing with it, we need to <i>take it away</i>.<p>We have sentences for crimes that are way too extreme in many cases because we told lawmakers with our votes that we wanted them to be &quot;tough on crime&quot; and that we wanted them to wage war on drugs. We have prosecutors and cops who have essentially unlimited discretion for the same reasons. We have a legal system that favors the rich because incumbent politicians who favor their rich donors have a re-election rate in the high 90&#x27;s even though their approval ratings are in the single digits. The system we have is not &quot;naked personal power&quot;; it&#x27;s the system that we, the voters, voted for. Democracy is working exactly the way it was designed to work. Burning it to the ground would not make it work better; it would make things worse. The way to make it better is to change the incentives of those who make the laws, by telling them different things with our votes.