Human beings are not risk-averse creatures for a number of reasons, chief among them that if we were we would not have made it off the savannah. We're used to thinking about "acceptable" risk and knowing what we can afford to give up. This is why we permit airlines to skimp on so much in order to get lower fares, and why we haven't pushed for a 40 mile an hour speed limit, although your risk of dying in a car accident increases strongly with velocity.

So when we say "we should limit risks," what we generally, in fact, mean is "we should limit risks when it doesn't inconvenience me". The problem is that this is a slippery slope, because what inconveniences one person is not inconveniencing for another--this simple fact is precisely why anti-smoking legislation has gone as far as it has. Case in point: personally, I'm not opposed to ban on bicycles on public roads, because I find it unsafe and inconvenient to find ways to give them a safe margin.

"So what are you saying, Uncle Klis? That we shouldn't regulate anyone at all?"

Yes. Or, more precisely, no--but we need to understand where regulation comes from. And we need, I think, to drop the sanctimonious "why shouldn't we?" attitude towards "reducing harm". It puts things in a utilitarian light that is, quite frankly, disingenuous, and I think we at least need to own up to the fact that "reducing harm" means "fucking people who aren't me over and using the general good of society as an excuse". Not deliberately, mind you, but that's what it does.

Look at drug laws, for example. Now, Uncle Klis doesn't use illegal drugs and doesn't really intend to. But let's be serious for a second: America doesn't have one single damned problem with drugs. Our tolerance for alcohol--to say nothing of caffeine or sugar (for that matter, to say nothing of the pharmaceutical industry) puts paid to that lie. So why is alcohol legal when cocaine isn't?

Simple answer: there's no reason. Defenders of drug prohibition act as though cocaine (for instance) is uniquely linked to crime in its production, distribution, and sale. Given the current treatment of coffee farmers around the world it should be obvious that we don't actually care much about human suffering in our mind-altering substances... but the idea that cocaine cultivation is linked to violence, addiction and death because cocaine is something special requires blatant, wilful ignorance of parts of American history. You know, like the Al Capone parts.

There are two types of drug prohibitionists. The first are those who genuinely believe that alcohol and coffee should be legal but heroin should not. These people are hypocrites, uneducated, misguided, or some combination of all three. Given how many more people cirrhosis (to say nothing of drunk driving) killed in 2001 than Usama, the notion that there is an objective, literally construed reason to support the legalisation of Ouzo but not opium requires a steadfast devotion to rejecting reality that I am disinclined to support.

The second are those people who would in their ideal world like to see alcohol, caffeine, etc. banned as well. These people generally also, however, realise that doing so would be untenable--and again we get to the crux of the "least harm" fallacy: we're only comfortable applying it when it's not our sacred cows on the barbie. Indeed, in many ways libertarianism's antipode is the reduction of harm incurred to anyone--so no smoking, no internal combustion, no fast food, etc. This is what we get when we allow others to make our decisions for us.

Do you think this is absurd? Then provide a compelling argument against it. Tell me what objective demarcation there is, or should be. When we start permitting the government to tell us what is good for us--and then mandate our compliance--what objective, failsafe, foolproof method warrants the stopping point to that behaviour? More than a quarter of Chinese Internet users think that online chatting should be controlled; eighty-five percent think the government should be able to regulate the Internet. I am hard pressed to think of an easy way to tell where it all stops, and this is what makes me a libertarian.

This and, also, that people in aggregate are apparently--the "wisdom of crowds" notwithstanding--markedly more rash and foolish than people as individuals. Ideally, a political philosophy would devolve to the notion of individual responsibility and individual action, as opposed to accepting (one hopes) the wisdom of the mobs. Key recent example: Lori Drew, now criminally indicted in the recent MySpace scandal wherein she allegedly drove a girl to suicide. A criminal indictment? Really?

This is what occurs when we transcend the realm of personal responsibility. We don't know, of course, what transpired here exactly, or what caused Megan to kill herself--Lori Drew? The antagonistic muttering of the wind in the trees? The original prosecutorial attempt concluded that there was no legitimate means to bring Drew up on charges, because criminalising speech in this fashion borders on creating thought crime. But the lynch mob mentality that has grown up demanding Drew "get" what "she deserves" has compelled a second attempt that in doing so is liable to create some very, very shaky legal precedents. My hope is that the case gets thrown out, and I imagine eventually it will--but the mentality of the rabble, when they get together, is frightening.

Frightening, but unavoidable. So in conclusion, let me advance a practical, pragmatic argument for libertarianism: regulation doesn't work. Prohibition doesn't stop anything--it merely forces it underground, so that we don't have to confront it, deal with it, or incorporate it. The result is a general balkanisation, separation, compartmentalisation, &c &c of society that neither solves any problems nor benefits the citizenry at large.

You may recognise this as a slight reformulation of the classic "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" tautology. It remains true across the board, however: gun control does not remove guns from society, it merely ensures that what guns remain present do so under society's auspices--either regulated by the government, or in the hands of criminals. We should, I think, find ourselves answering some hard questions in the coming years.

Similarly, increased penalties for online file sharing and increased consumer awareness have done nothing to limit the spread of piracy, which by some metrics continues to increase. Nor do speed limits change the speed at which people travel--as the behaviour of motorists in a work zone can attest (or for that matter, the difference in flow speed between I-5 and Highway 99 as north-south arteries in my adopted state).

Law is predicated on deterrence, but deterrence is a legal precept that has been shown, time and time again, not to work (this is one of the reasons why the death penalty is an ineffective punishment). "Crime" is itself a circular concept--crime is something that criminals do, and criminals are those who commit crimes. I propose, following from existing work in the social sciences, that while the primary function of laws may be the creation of order, in a practical sense the chief creation of laws is lawlessness.

You may think this maxim trite, and to a degree it certainly is. But it reflects a truism: the degree to which a society is regulated and the degree to which it is plagued by crime would seem closely tied, but the correlation is actually rather loose. A number of highly-regulated countries are low in crime, but then so too are a number of comparatively free ones (Canada, parts of Europe) and as well so are some tightly-regulated countries crime-prone (China springs to mind).

As such, laws don't change the game--they just move the goalposts. This is my argument: each new notion of crime does not serve to change the dynamic of a society, except insofar as it expands the demographic that may be considered criminal. Compromising, I will again reiterate that this argument does not call for the abolition of law itself--but it does suggest that we consider strongly the condemnatory choices we make.

We are treading on an interesting threshold, and now I turn that threshold to a technological bent. Consider: what is the role of the NSA, or any spying agency, when anyone can encrypt even the most mundane information so strongly that decrypting it becomes practically impossible? Do you think the government is going to stand for that? Do you think any government can afford to have so little control over its citizens? One imagines that the NSA will lobby (perhaps successfully) for companies to embed backdoors in their encryption or--using again the spectre of national security--the government will simply try to have strong encryption techniques banned.

Will this prevent Americans from doing it anyway? Of course not--but it will have criminalised yet another group of people. So goes the progression: perceived threat to governmental authority, crackdown, new group of felons. We face, I think, a serious threat to our concept of freedom itself. Will we rise to this challenge? Or in twenty years will eighty-five percent of us, too, freely grant our government the authority to control our information?

How many goodly creatures are there here?

-Alex