These plans for the AIA's were made before the residents of Washington voted on 901. It's not a nanny state order; it's to move the street drunks out of the areas where they harass the most people. Unless you like that kind of stuff. The problem with the AIA is that it does move the drunks, but to outlying areas. I say don’t do it, just add a chemical to the preferred sauces that makes them crap their pants almost immediately. I know that would make me want to quit drinking. [crack] [dook dook dook] ahhhhhhhh [rumble rumble pffftssssss gurgle tuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrddddd] D'oh! I crapped my pants!

I'll be out smoking tonight. In some type of ironic coincidence it's Tom Waits' birthday today, so I'll be drinking whiskey and smoking Old Golds. Anyone in West Seattle want to meet up? I'm thinking the corner pocket or some other dive-y place.

lovely noises. well done actually.

The beginning of the nanny state? We are already in the thick of the nanny state!

Laws requiring seat belt and helment use, limiting gambling, prohobiting drug consumption and prostitution, setting minimum wages and limiting working hours, regulating the hours during which alcohol can be sold; the list goes on and on, and began long before this ridiculous smoking ban.

All these activites occur in private between informed, consenting adults. That's the best characterization of a nanny law that I can think of.

I hear you, brother. Now, where's my horse?

i can see your point of view re: gambling, drug, prostitution, and maybe even seat belt and helmet use... but minimum wage and the 40 hour work week?

yeah, that fucking nanny state doesn't let 12 year old children work either.... damn them!

**shakes fist towards the sky**

Nice slight of hand, trying to imply that I attacked child labor laws. Not only did they not appear in my comment, but they clearly cannot be described as laws limiting interactions between "informed, consenting adults".

Would you care to explain just how, fundamentally, a law limiting prostitution differs from a law requiring a minimum wage? (Besides "prostitution left wing and cool, low wages right wing and bad"?) If an employer and I agree to exchange X hours of work for Y dollars, how is that different from a prostitute and a client agreeing to exchange sex act Q for payment P? As far as I can tell, both are transactions limited to the informed, consenting adults participating in them, and thus the government has no business regulating either of them.

The "Nanny State" argument doesn't work in a world where I pay more taxes in order to pay for your lung cancer. You crash your motorcycle without a helmet and get paralyzed from the neck down, and charge your recovery bills to the state. Well, I pay more in local/state/fed/medicare to cover your dumb-nohelmet-wearing ass. Not going to work for me anymore.

The "Nanny State" argument presupposes that you could (and would) deal with the repurcussions of your actions without asking the rest of us to pitch in and pick your irresponsible butt off the carpet. We all know that it just doesn't end up working that way. You get pissed off about taxes, vote down school levies, bitch about "the nanny state" then go drinking during the day, jump on your motorcycle without a helmet (while drunk) and plow into a tree. I'm supposed to pay for that, no questions asked?

You cant (and wont) stop using my tax dollars. So I am going to demand that you use some common sense.

ps. i'm a former smoker. but you know what? i don't have the right to make other people breath in my bads habit.

The argument that "we have the right to regulate private behavior because it could cost taxpayer money" has some validity, but not enough convince me. Perhaps if you think through its full implications, you'll start to question it, too.

First off, the extra costs that would be imposed by not legally requiring helments or seat belts are much less than the extra costs imposed by many behaviors that we don't regulate, or even choose to encourage. For example, we spend many billions of dollars encouraging people to live in flood-prone areas, then many billions more cleaning up and getting them to move back after a flood. This inconsistency seems to indicate that the tax savings aren't the real reason for these regulations, but instead just an excuse to limit unpopular private behaviors.

Second, because almost any behavior has potential consequences for taxpayers, the scope of the justification is nearly unlimited. Advocating the election of Democrats might cause taxes to increase; wouldn't that justify a ban on advocating the election of Democrats by your logic? How do you decide where to draw the line> I find it easiest just to begin by refusing to regulate private behavior, and then decide for which consequences the taxpayers are nonetheless willing to pick up the tab.

In your P.S., you actually use an entirely different argument: a "protecting the rights of non-smokers not to breathe smoke" argument. This argument is much more blatently wrong, because no one is forced to eat or work in a smoking restaurant. Already the vast majority of restaurants are non-smoking, in order to cater to the vast majority of non-smokers. If smokers choose to eat and work in their own restaurants, that doesn't force smoke into any non-smoker lungs.

P.S. I an a lifetime non-smoker who prefers to eat in non-smoking restaurants. I don't have the right to impose my healthy habbits on anyone else.

A well reasoned response, David, though it just doesnt pass my "straight face test." The argument, if I understand it correctly, is that government should not be in the business of telling people what behaviour is safe and what isn't, because government is somehow incapable of drawing fair and reasonale lines.

The problem inherent in the argument is the fallacy of the "big scary government from Mars." In other words, "government is this crazy, foreign institution that is made up of strange people with strange rules and strange behaviour that screws up everything it touches."

This, to me, is a phalisy that we can no longer afford. If Katrina, the Medicare crisis and oversight failures like Enron and Vioxx show us anything, its that we need a strong government with rational and reasonable direction in order to ensure that the forces larger than us are regulated and monitored for our protection. We do not live in a world where the individual has enough power be safe from the corporations, economic forces, product makers, financial institutions, tsunamis, earthquakes and doctors who will try to screw, lay-off, choke, gauge, drown, crush and remove the wrong organ from him. At least not without some help from a force large enough to compel some of those large players to act fairly and justly.

Now, sometimes government gets off on a tangent (Terri Schiavo, Iraq) or gets things wrong (Ronald Reagan), but that's not government's fault, its ours. We need government to help protect and defend us, thats why we pay it our taxes. In exchange, we must act as constant monitors of how the government does its job. Our elected officials are the enforcement arm of that oversight. Our oversight of them is our vote.

When I say that I don't want to pay for you to not wear a helmet, its because I know that we all share an expectation of government protection, and therefore our individual behaviour has an impact on the collective health.

Its not the government's fault if unreasonable regulation happens, and it certainly isn't an endictment of regulating individual behaviour. Its an indictment of our failure as monitors of the public trust.

I was trying to be cute with the many spellings of "fallacy." I don't think it worked.

But it all comes down to the same thing...forces that are bigger than the individual. For example:

-Most prostitutes are not consenting adults. Most are sex-workers who are forced to participate in a dangerous and unhealthy practice (for which their employer, not them keeps most of the money). They are, in many instances, under-age, in financial straits, under duress, and without the ability to fight back or choose another profession.

Government stands outside the makret, that's its value. The market can do good things, but it can do evil things as well. Government is the best hope of our society and our collective demand for progress towards a better life for everybody. Minimum wage laws do that for workers, prostituion laws do that for sex workers, OSHA laws do that for employees, etc...

i would suggest looking it up. perhaps the [sarcasm] tag needs to be re-introduced to bd.

in my opinion, minimum wage is a measure which protects a massive number of americans from low-wage unfair and exploitative work. and remember, the governments 1st job is to protect us.. and that's not just from the "evil-doers" we all know and love.

theoretically, minimum wage also discourages labor intensive industries from using the exploitative measures of dirt cheap labor and encourages businesses to invest in capital, education and training for their work force. (of course, in the global workforce, it also encourages displacement of jobs abroad... something for which there is an answer, but for which this thread does not apply). the key point is labor laws (which include child labor laws) give americans which agree to enter the work force a base level at which they know they cannot legally be treated below. and while the minimum wage has been called into question in the past 20 years, new evidence shows that it is even more important in 21st century america, as the influx of illegal aliens and pressures abroad have encouraged businesses to get the cheapest labor for the cheapest amount. the minimum wage ensures that a race to the bottom does not take place.

prostitution, on the other hand, is a transaction between two consenting adults, not between a massive labor market and powerful multi-billion dollar industries. and, while the government has the duty of protecting a large segment of our population with the minimum wage, it does not have the duty of protecting the individual from him or herself. therefore, i can see the reasonable argument that flippin' tricks should not be illegal, but should be a regulated industry which can help set health standards, insure that physical abuse is not rampant, prevent underage participation and encourage those that are willing to seek counseling.

however, i also agree with Benny G, in terms of the impacts of others upon society and the reasons that helmet laws, smoking bans and seat-belt laws are in place, as these are decisions that the individual makes which effect others in terms of physical health and monetary well being.

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my post, Benny G. I hope you're still interested enough to read my response in turn.

I have to take issue with the premise of your last post. My argument is not that the government shouldn't regulate private behaviors because it regulates them poorly. On the contrary, most of the time the behaviors the goverment demands are the right ones: certainly I would advocate wearing helments and seat-belts, using alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs only in moderation, and not pursuing a career in prostitution.

My argument is that neither I nor the goverment has any business demanding that you behave in any way, be it right or wrong, in your private interactions with other informed, consenting adults. In other words, while it may be the job of goverment to save me from malicious others, it is most emphaticaly not the job of government to save me and my mutually consenting friends from ourselves.

Here's an analogy: You probably agree that there are wrong ideas, and that it is bad to advocate those ideas (e.g. Nazism, perhaps even Republicanism). You probably also agree that, even if an idea is wrong, government should not forbid people to think it or publicly advocate it. It's not the validity of the idea that's at stake, but a fundamental limitation on the role of government. We regard this limitation as so important that we are even willing to publicly bear some of the indirect costs that arise from it (e.g. police at a protest march).

Now I happen to believe that there should be another fundamental limitation on goverment: government should not regulate private behavior among informed, consenting adults. Like the right to free speech, this right (call it "live and let live" or "the right to privacy"), (1) applies whether or not the behavior is good and (2) applies even if indirect public costs arise from it.

It's true that the right to privacy doesn't appear explicitly in the constitution. But the supreme court does claim it exists, and has even used it to justify some decisions that would generally be considered liberal. For example, in Lawrence, the court ruled that Texas couldn't prohit private, consensual gay sex. They didn't rule that gay sex was good, or that gay sex doesn't undermine the traditional family. They ruled that even if gay sex is bad and does undermine the traditional family, the government can't regulate it.

Perhaps you don't believe in a right to privacy. You think that government should get to regulate gay sex, but should allow it because gay sex is just fine. Or perhaps you think that government should ban gay sex. In any case, if you just don't believe in this right, there isn't much I can do to convince you. We can argue back and forth about the benefits and costs of the right, but at some level it is a moral axiom that you either accept or don't accept.

But perhaps you do believe in a right to privacy. In that case, I would ask you to enunciate a legal test that might allow a court to distinguish a between situations where the right applies (gay sex? cohabitation? contraception? abortion?) and situations where it doesn't (seat belts? drug and alcohol consumption? prostitution? smoking? gambling?).

If you've gotten this far, thanks! I look forward to your reply.

David:

First, You should go ahead and sign up as a member. As a BetterDOnkey co-founder I think its a worthwhile experience and is something you should do.

Now, on to the argument.

While I don't love the fact that the right to abortion and gay sex are supported by as squishy a notion as "privacy" I am a believer in the foundation of Grsiwald v Connecticut, Lawrence and of course Roe. The problem is, and will always be, where do you draw the line between you acting on your own or with another in a manner that is consistent with a safe and democratic society (i.e. "protected speech") and an activity that jeopardizes the physical or fiscal health of others or our society.

I would suggest that the explosion in population, the crumbling of the government's ability to respond effectively to slow and fast moving threats (health care, Katrina, terrorism) and the new interconnectedness of a world that is now flat and small, means that we need to redraw the lines between the public and the private sphere.

I dont believe, for instance, that the government has any place in regulating the activity of 2 gay men if they are both consenting and able to consent.

If, on the other hand, one is a prostitute, I do not believe that the government should buy the argument that this is simply commerce, like buying melons from a grocer. We know that most prostitues are not in their profession out of choice. They are compelled into sex-work by coercion, overty and desperation. By allowing the trade to exist in the open, the government plays a part in condemning men and women to lives of risk, despair and violence. That is wrong.

The same goes with smoking. If you smoke, you put other people at risk. Some of those people know the risks they take and choose to be near you anyway. FIne. But some don't. And the only way to protect those people (such as waitresses and back-room staff)is to use the police power of the government to keep smoking out of their place of employment.

Now, I did think of a new problem with this sort of a standard. What if the government looks at the cost to society of such behaviour as unprotected sex and imposes tickets or violations for doing so? (not a terrible idea, by the way).

The answer is to apply a discrimination standard. If the tickets are given as often to straight people as they are to gay people (as there are risks for both sorts of unprotected sex), then such a ticket would be fine by me.

It seems to me that we are entering a time when large forces put all of us more risk than ever before. While individual rishgts are still critically important, they can no longer be the sole guide of legal limits on police power. The right of the community to exist and survive must be weighed as well.