Legislating Morality

I am stuck in Utah and have to drive thousands of miles to talk to a human. I read the Sutherland Institute Blog simply because they are part of the State Policy Network. I've traveled to Denver to talk to the Independence Institute and Phoenix to speak with the Goldwater Institute in my desperate attempt to find people interested in free market health care reform.

In every case, I am referred back to Sutherland Institute because I suffer the misfortune of living in Utah.

The Sutherland Institute is not a free market organization. If anything it is the opposite leaning more to fascism than to freedom. Hell will freeze over before these clowns will ever spend a second in serious consideration of free market health care reform.

The group takes money claiming to support the free market then does inane things like dismiss an argument because a women has a hyphenated name!

I am writing this post simply to make a place to post the following gem from Paul Mero today:

"Let me remind my conservative and libertarian friends that the whole purpose of law is to legislate morality. The whole intellectual and logical framework of law is to address the everyday realities when two or more humans interact and what is best for people as human beings and best for them when they interact. "

Is this guy smoking pot, or what? The law cannot see our intentions it can only see our actions. No matter how complex one makes the law, there will always be cases when people commit immoral acts which are legal, and people breaking laws to commit moral acts. Most laws have nothing to do with morality. There is not a moral imperative dictating that we must drive on the right side of the street. Traffic laws were designed to reduce accidents.

The Founders realized that all the well intentioned attempts in history to legislate morality failed. The classical liberals realized that law should be limited to those areas necessary to prevent civil breakdown.

The Left makes the mistake in believing that we realize morality through the largess of the state. The Right plays the same game.

I am not a big fan of the drug legalization movement. The tragic history of both Prohibition and the War on Drugs seems to show that attempts to legislate morality have a very deep cost.

Anyway, the only reason for this post was to cut out this gem from a group that takes money from the State Policy Network with claims they support the freedom movement.

They don't.