Bad Idea #20 - No consensual crime should be illegal.

20. Any action in which nobody is harmed against his own consent, should not be made illegal.

My roommate's worldview is fairly impractical. He believes that no law should make any action where people's freedom to harm themselves should be made illegal. He believes that all drugs, regardless of how they are used, should be made freely available to adults. Basically he doesn't believe that the government should punish us when we make decisions that the government believes is harmful - prostitution, drugs, not wearing seatbelts, and pornography should not be illegal.

He believes that the role of government is to protect each individual from the encroachment of rights by others, not to make things best for society at large. Actually, he's probably never thought it through, and thinks that these two ideas are the same thing. I'm not going to address that problem, though, and instead will focus on how behavior that generally is harmful should be illegal.

His view is simple - if it harms someone that has no choice in the matter, it should be illegal. Unfortunately, his definitions of "harm" and "choice" are poorly conceived. I have given him hypothetical scenarios in which someone does what he believes should be legal, and I explain why it still harms others. He probably has never thought about concepts like Cass Mastern's Spider Web theory, or the butterfly effect, or anything at all about unintended consequences.

This is a pretty standard dialogue between me and him.
Me - "So you think that if a man wants to smoke crack cocaine that should be perfectly legal?"
Him - "Yes. Absolutely, what right does someone have to tell someone else what to do?"
Me - "But don't you think that causes harm to others?"
Him - "No, I don't think so."
Me - "And who will take care of his children? Should his employer be able to collect damages for him not fulfilling his employment contract? Who pays for the task of cleaning up the mess he leaves behind, if his own estate has already been plundered by his drug habit?"
Him - "Uh...I don't know. I'll talk to you about it later."

I've had this conversation about workplace safety as well. I don't believe that profit-minded entities can be trusted to do the right thing and provide for workplace safety in a transparent and fair manner, when it would be easier to maintain the status quo.

The best part was when I got him to say that auctioning off citizen votes in an election should be legal. I led him down that path for a bit and ultimately got him to uncomfortably admit that outright bribery of politicians should be legal. His reasoning was that the rest of society was free to bribe the politician NOT to take the other bribe, if they wanted it enough. But finally he conceded that the stakes were too high and that it would ultimately be bad for a society to allow bribery to take place. Seriously, when someone has to debate and convince you that bribing politicians should be illegal, your ideas are probably terrible.