Your wonderful totally bogus freedom, Mark Morford

[madokie]

You are so wild and lawless and rebellious! But not really
By Mark Morford

Damn all these rules and regulations! Damn these incessant edicts and bans and restrictions!

It's like you can't swing a dead economy these days without hitting some new decree set up by the ever-prying government, some new commandment ostensibly designed to stop harmful or stupid behavior and make it tougher for good, law-abiding citizens to, say, smoke, stab, scream, urinate in public, kill themselves, pollute, make a mess of things in general.

Don't you hate that? No? You really should.

Don't you feel the outrage? There is outrage. There is always outrage, even over what might seem the most trivial and relatively optimistic advancements and announcements and legislation. It's just how we roll. ...

(click here to read the rest)

(Full URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/06/17/notes061709.DTL&nl=fix)

[RandomThoughts]

1. I just don't like the use of punitive monetary measures to control behavior.

If taxation is used on anything that might be unhealthy, then a slippery slope would mean only rich people might someday be able to eat a steak, drink a glass of wine, have kids ride skateboards, or any other behavior that in a social context cost everyone money, but is also part of having free choices.

If taxation is used to lower the usage of something, it really only lowers its usage in one class of people, in that it is not just.

Maybe someday it will be the safest gruel and water for the bottom 50% and steaks and good wine for the top 50%

If it is so bad, make it illegal.

[ThomWV]

2. Good concept but I thought the article was poorly written

There is good point in that article but it was poorly made, I thought. There is a wealth of material that might have been pulled in to establish the justification for regulation (or not) and mountains of it that might have been used to sustain the argument - but next to none was presented. A sentence from Hobbs or Jefferson could have easily set the tone, a handfull of recent examples of picayune law could have been snatched from the Federal Register to carry the call, and an example or two of overzealous regulation to close the conversation would have added great strength to it.

That said I still want to thank you for posting it - plenty of room for thought to be had there.

Thanks!

Thom