This idea is not original to me.
How many dead people is freedom worth? Thousands of people have already given their lives for it. How many is too many? To be more specific, if we knew ahead of time that we could save 10 million lives by giving up our freedom of speech, would you choose to do so?
What about freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, freedom from unlawful search and seizure, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, and so on?
This sounds very abstract, but it becomes less so when we consider laws designed to protect us. For example, the US Supreme Court has ruled that police checkpoints (where the police stop every motorist in search of drunken drivers, or illegal immigrants, or something like that) do violate the 4th Amerndment to the Constitution, but are OK anyway when they're in the public interest. I don't know how many deaths have been prevented by sobriety checkpoints, but it's probably been at least 10. Is that enough?
Periodically we hear (usually in the context of some new safety law) the phrase "If it saves even one life it will be worth it." I'm skeptical. Everybody dies, and postponing death for one person by a few years, even by a few decades, does not have infinite value.
In 2008 the US Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA). Intended to remove sources of lead from the mouths of young children, its side effects include driving out of business "tens of thousands" of companies, including thrift stores. I consider myself part of the anti-lead-in-babies camp, but that is a little drastic, especially in these difficult economic times. Nobody even knows if CPSIA will save any lives at all (it was passed in a fit of hysteria over Chinese imports, with very little scientific justification), but only one Congressman out of all of them voted against it.
What I conclude from all this is that people don't actually value freedom very much at all.
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Everything has a cost, and we often do not value what we have until we are asked to pay that cost. For instance, sobriety checkpoints likely safe lives by discouraging drunk driving, but at the cost of less time, money, and effort spent on other law enforcement activities. As the old saying goes, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pounce of cure.", and time spent preventing death and injury due to drunk driving seems a better effort than arresting/prosecuting/incarcerating offenders after the damage has been done.
ReplyDeleteNo doubt that CPSIA is having unintended consequences. Since we have no power to penalize foreign manufacturers directly, penalizing the shipment of "untested" goods is the only option. However, this places unnecessary burden on domestics businesses - completely unnecessary - because we do have the power to enforce product safety domestically.
Of course, people hold different values for the same thing. The recent "Tea Party" protests might be another good example of this.
I'm skeptical that sobriety checkpoints actually save lives. In order to do a full cost-benefit analysis, though, you'd have to be able to quantify the future problems that come from conditioning Americans to think that it's ok for the police to stop you when you haven't done anything wrong. If it never goes beyond sobriety checkpoints then that cost is pretty low. If it enables a future police state then that cost is pretty high.
ReplyDelete(Future government revenue lost is an approximation of the value, to the government, of a human life.)
A simple cost-benefit analysis could start by looking at the average number of drunk drivers caught by a sobriety checkpoint, the average number of people killed per drunk driver, the future government revenues lost per victim, the future government revenues lost by incarcerating drunk drivers, and the present-day cost of running a checkpoint (both in terms of police personnel costs and the cost of delaying ordinary people.)