Legalize Drunk Driving

Legalize Drunk Driving.  Sounds crazy, doesn't it?

If you consider drunk driving laws as one more link in the chain of abuse constructed by the progressive social engineers, and that it punishes someone because they might do harm, it no longer sounds quite so absurd.  Look back to where we started from:

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. (Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 62)

Here is Lew Rockwell's take:

The feds have declared that a blood-alcohol level of 0.08 percent and above is criminal and must be severely punished. The National Restaurant Association is exactly right that this is absurdly low. The overwhelming majority of accidents related to drunk driving involve repeat offenders with blood-alcohol levels twice that high. If a standard of 0.1 doesn't deter them, then a lower one won't either.

Probability and Ambiguity
Here is the truly insidious nature of lawmaking the modern American era.  The laws are so complex that ordinary people no longer know where the boundaries are.  Can you tell the difference between when your blood alcohol level is at .08 and when it is at .10?

Into this gap of ambiguity steps the regulator.  Behave yourself and don't make trouble and you'll be OK.  Decide to be a rabble rouser, and the regulators will hound you at every tiny infraction. 

What have we done by permitting government to criminalize the content of our blood instead of actions themselves? We have given it power to make the application of the law arbitrary, capricious, and contingent on the judgment of cops and cop technicians. Indeed, without the government's "Breathalyzer," there is no way to tell for sure if we are breaking the law.

Now, the immediate response goes this way: drunk driving has to be illegal because the probability of causing an accident rises dramatically when you drink. The answer is just as simple: government in a free society should not deal in probabilities. The law should deal in actions and actions alone, and only insofar as they damage person or property. 

Some reasonable people will say I've gone too far.  All I can do in response is ask why eating french fries and texting while driving are not punished the same as drunk driving.  Why did congress tax tanning salons and not hookah parlors or swimming pools?  Why ban smoking in privately-owned business (like here in Colorado) but not flatulence? 

Or as Jefferson would say,

"We lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of rights; that without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIV, 1782. ME 2:199