> That's not an unreasonable position, but consider this counterpoint: in the long run, there is more danger in people thinking it's sometimes okay to break laws, than in allowing whatever conduct was going to inevitably happen.

It seems like the problem is you've got one of these: Low false positives, low false negatives, simple laws; pick two.

To which some people are going to say that we shouldn't have simple laws, but that's really not a good alternative. Even if the law says exactly what you want (which is Hard), the administrative burden of following and enforcing laws that complicated can exceed the benefits.

So if you're stuck choosing between false positives and false negatives, the libertarian position falls out pretty quickly. Because in order to provide deterrence and account for less than 100% enforcement, the penalties for breaking the law are generally much higher than the societal cost of the crime, which means that the government convicting a good person has a much higher societal cost than the government not convicting a bad person. In other words, the laws should err on the side of things not being illegal.

But you're applying this to government action. And there are certainly things government officers can do that justify removing them from the general population and to which the same principle applies. But we have another alternative in this case, which is to remove them from the government. The burden for firing government officers should be a lot lower than for putting them in prison, which means we should reasonably do it a lot more aggressively when there is even the slightest hint of misconduct.