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Comment by skookumchuck | Hacker News Reader

Governmental attempts to suppress "immoral" but natural human behavior has been tried for thousands of years and has never worked. I.e. attempts to stop:

* drinking

* gambling

* prostitution

* drugs

* adultery

* homosexuality

* lending money

* black markets

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"has never worked"? Sounds like you're setting a hard metric. I'm pretty sure that changing laws does have some influence on the social norms and culture around some of these items, and their level of consumption. The propents of some of these rules might call it a success even if it just changes behaviours or attitudes about them.

Feel free to post an example of any society, now or historical, that has managed to suppress any of these activities into inconsequence by making them illegal.

But why is "suppress into inconsequence" the appropriate metric? Murder is illegal but isn't "suppressed into inconsequence" by the law.

Are you kidding me? Almost all of those activities are restricted to significant, meaningful degrees in the U.S. Or have been in the past (e.g. homosexuality). I think only adultery stands out as not.

Regulation doesn't need to "suppress an activity into inconsequence" to be useful. There are many ways regulation can beneficially impact activity in between the extremes. The vast majority of regulation does this. The extreme of "completely abolish an activity" isn't a practical or useful goal in most cases.

Just because you couldn’t see an activity doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening in a vibrant sub-culture.

It obviously hasn't stopped these problems from ever happening, but do you have evidence that the policies are not effective at all?

Drinking went up during Prohibition.

That is about a specific bad policy, not about the concept of instituting policies to reduce these behaviors in general. I agree that some policies do not accomplish what they intend to.

What about taxes on alcohol that fund anti-drinking campaigns and help fund treatment centers?

> That is about a specific bad policy

It's exactly the kind of thing I was talking about

> What about

That is not making it illegal.

> That is about a specific bad policy

Yes, exactly.

> What about taxes on alcohol that fund anti-drinking campaigns and help fund treatment centers?

They mostly fund anti-youth-drinking campaigns and responsible drinking campaigns, not anti-drinking campaigns (OTOH, tobacco taxes often do fund anti-smoking campaigns.) They also fund licensing and enforcement agencies that license vendors and enforce laws against selling to youth, selling in inappropriate venues, etc.

I think you would find that many people who oppose prohibition of prostitution would support loosely similar tax, regulatory, and enforcement structures.

I mean, if you limit your view to what the government is trying to suppress to those narrow categories then I guess you're right. But one area that government enforcement of morality has resoundingly worked is child porn. It's very hard for a normal person to find it and I for one am glad the government is working hard to curb access to it.

Children are not legally consenting adults and have special protections. It's not a mere morality issue.

Lending money?

Usury is not without controversy.

In ye old days people thought charging interest was a sin right in there with adulatory

And yet people lent money anyway, they just used complex accounting maneuvers to obfuscate it.

And they still do. Look up "Islamic Mortgages". The level of hoops people will jump through to keep some semblance of logical consistency in their nonsense is just absurd.

I suggest the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Almost all early religious entities, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, condemned the concept of using money to make money as immoral. The belief was that money was meant to exchange debt, not make people wealthy off that debt.

Today Islam still holds this as a majority view in many places (not universally). I'm simplifying it a lot, so I really recommend the book. There is a strong correlation between debt and guilt. In Christian doctrine, they're very interchangeable (forgive us our debts/sins as we forgive those who are indebted to/have sinned against us).

Guilt, Sin and debt are the same word in many ancient languages, including old English. Guilt and debt are still the same word in German.

I thought that Judaism had some sort of exception that allowed usury in the case of lending to non-Jewish people. This was why many banks back then were run by them.

My understanding is that a lot of banking was jewish simply because of their legal system. You could reasonably expect a jewish bank to obey a jewish court decision, even if that court was on another continent. This lent an otherwise unheard of level of credibility, and allowed jewish banks to network like no other.

> lending money

Usually, not that, just charging interest.

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