Who owns me?

If I owned myself, then I'd be able to:

• sell my body parts
• rent my body parts

Laws that prohibit those things have severe consequences. Thousands of people who are waiting for an organ transplant die every year. Prostitutes are mistreated and enslaved by their pimps.

Lawmakers believe that those things are less bad than people feeling economic pressure to sell or rent themselves when they don't want to. That's appalling. People feel economic pressure every day; that's why we have jobs. People make foolish decisions every day too; we don't need the nanny state to protect us from every bad decision that we might make.

Things That Should Be Banned (And Things That Shouldn't)

Society bans lots of things for lots of reasons, but in general they fall into two categories: things that are bad, and things that might lead to things that are bad.

For example, burglary is illegal. So is the possession of burglary tools.

An intermediate step is targeted taxation. Society thinks that smoking leads to bad things, so we tax it extra. The same is true of alcohol and gasoline. Now they're talking about taxing soda pop.

Over time, more and more things are being banned or restricted because they might lead to bad things happening. One must register with the government to buy my favorite allergy medicine. Driving a car without wearing a seatbelt, riding a motorcycle without wearing a helmet, living within a certain distance of a school after committing certain kinds of offenses, carrying a gun, taking powerful drugs without a prescription, and more are illegal in various places (de facto if not de jure).

What if we only banned things that were actually bad?

What if we only banned things that hurt other people?