What you have to understand about laws is that they were never intended to protect anyone. Laws provide order, a structure that organizes how people interact. They are a set of guidelines and instructions intended to program human behavior. The notion that laws protect us, that they exist to outlaw harmful behavior from hurting all of us citizens is a quaint one. But that notion is the article of faith upon which civil society survives. Murder is not outlawed because it is wrong but because those who would murder are not deemed useful citizens.
Any behavior that is useful, regardless of harm, is perfectly legal. Just ask any CEO who has destroyed a thousand lives at a stroke. Ask his victims. The equation of morality with legality is one of the great myths of the modern world.
Victimless crimes are the most obvious hole in the belief that laws are there for protection rather than order. Prostitution, substance abuse, and the entire gamut of crimes not against individuals but against Puritanism cannot exist to protect people since such crimes by definition do not hurt anyone. Why are there victimless crimes at all then?
There are many victimless crimes that are strictly structural in nature. Most civil laws fall into this category: parking laws, traffic laws, noise ordinances. These laws exist in order to grease the wheels of society and keep the entire engine moving. They are not conceptually nefarious, except in so far as every bureaucracy is its own form of malice.
Structural laws are distinct though from criminal laws that punish individuals for actions that do not affect other people. Smoking pot in your home does not just not infringe on the rights of anyone else (the supposed basis of law, the protection of other citizens' rights), but does not affect anyone else in any way whatsoever. The criminalization of private behavior, whether in the realms of sexuality or substance, is in stark contradiction to the assumed basis of laws. If a joint is smoked in a forest and no one smells it, was a crime still committed? How can an action that sends no ripples out to the rest of society be deemed harmful, illegal, wrong?
To understand why certain private behaviors are outlawed, we must approach the problem obliquely. Who are such laws designed to ensnare? Drug use laws primarily trip up young people who disdain following rules for the sake of the rules themselves. The laws that don't make sense exist specifically to catch individuals who are willing to break laws that don't make sense. They are tripwires set up by society to criminalize the individuals unwilling to accept arbitrary government authority.
The individuals most likely to break the laws that really matter to power brokers are the exact same individuals who are likely to break stupid laws when they are young. And in doing so, they are demonized and removed from the political process for the rest of their lives. Stalin's secret police could not have dreamed of creating so perfect a snare for those most likely to resist the government. Society itself condemns the very individuals most likely to be willing to fight the government on behalf of the people.
America has perfected this system, imprisoning over one percent of its adult population. One out of every thirty American adults is in prison, on parole, or on probation. Over half those convicts were convicted of nonviolent victimless crime. If there was no victim, if there was no violence, what exactly could the crime have been?
Marijuana, we are told, is a gateway drug, it leads to criminal behavior. Alcohol though is perfectly kosher. A six pack of Coors never led to anything but good times. The reason alcohol doesn't lead to a criminal future is that being caught with three ounces of it doesn't sacrifice your freedom, your education and your right to vote. Make any arbitrary behavior criminal and it will beget further criminal behavior. Criminalize cracking your knuckles and knuckle cracking will become a gateway behavior, guaranteed to lead to a lifetime of shitty jobs and dead-end opportunities to nowhere. And a significant portion of our potential future leaders will be caught up in the dragnet. Leaders buck authority. They tear down arbitrary rules. If we criminalize the arbitrary, we criminalize the best of who we are. We outlaw the very children upon whom the future depends.
It's a circular logic. Item A is illegal. Illegality's punishment is to destroy your life and brand you as a criminal. Therefore anyone who touches item A is a criminal with a destroyed life. The knot pulls tight for any value of item A. Marijuana, knuckle cracking, cola, burritos, homosexuality. Insert absolutely any behavior or substance for A and you get the same result. That is not a judgment of item A, it is the beautiful design of a mechanism for destroying individuality.
More to the point, it is a system designed to break and discredit at a young age any individual willing to openly challenge authority.
Any behavior that is useful, regardless of harm, is perfectly legal. Just ask any CEO who has destroyed a thousand lives at a stroke. Ask his victims. The equation of morality with legality is one of the great myths of the modern world.
Victimless crimes are the most obvious hole in the belief that laws are there for protection rather than order. Prostitution, substance abuse, and the entire gamut of crimes not against individuals but against Puritanism cannot exist to protect people since such crimes by definition do not hurt anyone. Why are there victimless crimes at all then?
There are many victimless crimes that are strictly structural in nature. Most civil laws fall into this category: parking laws, traffic laws, noise ordinances. These laws exist in order to grease the wheels of society and keep the entire engine moving. They are not conceptually nefarious, except in so far as every bureaucracy is its own form of malice.
Structural laws are distinct though from criminal laws that punish individuals for actions that do not affect other people. Smoking pot in your home does not just not infringe on the rights of anyone else (the supposed basis of law, the protection of other citizens' rights), but does not affect anyone else in any way whatsoever. The criminalization of private behavior, whether in the realms of sexuality or substance, is in stark contradiction to the assumed basis of laws. If a joint is smoked in a forest and no one smells it, was a crime still committed? How can an action that sends no ripples out to the rest of society be deemed harmful, illegal, wrong?
To understand why certain private behaviors are outlawed, we must approach the problem obliquely. Who are such laws designed to ensnare? Drug use laws primarily trip up young people who disdain following rules for the sake of the rules themselves. The laws that don't make sense exist specifically to catch individuals who are willing to break laws that don't make sense. They are tripwires set up by society to criminalize the individuals unwilling to accept arbitrary government authority.
The individuals most likely to break the laws that really matter to power brokers are the exact same individuals who are likely to break stupid laws when they are young. And in doing so, they are demonized and removed from the political process for the rest of their lives. Stalin's secret police could not have dreamed of creating so perfect a snare for those most likely to resist the government. Society itself condemns the very individuals most likely to be willing to fight the government on behalf of the people.
America has perfected this system, imprisoning over one percent of its adult population. One out of every thirty American adults is in prison, on parole, or on probation. Over half those convicts were convicted of nonviolent victimless crime. If there was no victim, if there was no violence, what exactly could the crime have been?
Marijuana, we are told, is a gateway drug, it leads to criminal behavior. Alcohol though is perfectly kosher. A six pack of Coors never led to anything but good times. The reason alcohol doesn't lead to a criminal future is that being caught with three ounces of it doesn't sacrifice your freedom, your education and your right to vote. Make any arbitrary behavior criminal and it will beget further criminal behavior. Criminalize cracking your knuckles and knuckle cracking will become a gateway behavior, guaranteed to lead to a lifetime of shitty jobs and dead-end opportunities to nowhere. And a significant portion of our potential future leaders will be caught up in the dragnet. Leaders buck authority. They tear down arbitrary rules. If we criminalize the arbitrary, we criminalize the best of who we are. We outlaw the very children upon whom the future depends.
It's a circular logic. Item A is illegal. Illegality's punishment is to destroy your life and brand you as a criminal. Therefore anyone who touches item A is a criminal with a destroyed life. The knot pulls tight for any value of item A. Marijuana, knuckle cracking, cola, burritos, homosexuality. Insert absolutely any behavior or substance for A and you get the same result. That is not a judgment of item A, it is the beautiful design of a mechanism for destroying individuality.
More to the point, it is a system designed to break and discredit at a young age any individual willing to openly challenge authority.
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