> In a world where the government provides health care as a service (which is where we're trending, eventually), abusing your own health does have a victim: the taxpayer.
An almost fair point... if and only if we get there, I'm not yet convinced we will, however drug use is not drug abuse. To call it a health issue it'd first have to affect your health negatively. If it does, that can be seen by the doctor and noted and then maybe you can be taxed higher to compensate, but use is not abuse.
Also, serious abuse could save tax payers money by killing you. So just because something affects your health negatively doesn't mean it costs more over your lifetime.
> Gambling is often predatory to the poorer classes of society. Depending on how you're defining victim, low-income-earners could be seen as victims of gambling
I reject the notion that you can be your own victim. If you choose to make decisions that hurt you, you must suffer the consequences; it is not the state's place to protect you from yourself. Jumping out of a perfectly good air plane is legal, and has a very high chance of killing you compared to other hobbies but we don't outlaw that.
> Bigamy is historically correlated with misogyny.
Not a reason to make it a crime. I'm allowed to hate things.
> Also, ironically, bigamy is not a violation of christian morality; there are myriad examples of one-man-many-woman relationships in the Bible
It's a violation of modern Christian morality; times change and so do the church's sense of morals.
> I reject the notion that you can be your own victim. If you choose to make decisions that hurt you, you must suffer the consequences; it is not the state's place to protect you from yourself.
Forget the state for a moment and try to scale it down. In a village where everybody knows and depends on each other, what would you do if an outsider came along and tricked one of your fellow villagers out of all their means?
When winter came, would you let that person die? No, you would use your own means to keep them alive.
Now, the next time this trickster came to town, would you just let them prey on the less perceptive of your fellow villagers again?
You're talking about fraud, I am not, your example does not apply. People like to gamble, they know they're probably going to lose, they are not being defrauded or lied to by being allowed to gamble.
There are countless problems with your analogy, however I will focus on one. Smoking pot recreationally cannot be equated with a trickster fooling someone out of all their money.
> If you choose to make decisions that hurt you, you must suffer the consequences; it is not the state's place to protect you from yourself.
1. Not ever? Surely you don't think that the age of majority/consent is 0-years-old?
2. Taxation for Military defense falls under that same umbrella! Normally, people would never pay any taxes to support it until they feel threatened... And then it's too late, and they suffer from their own short-sighted penny-pinching. Are you saying the government should not collectively protect them from their own decisions?
> Need I preface everything I say with "between consenting adults?"
No, because it wouldn't help your argument anyway: The point (which I think you've tacitly acknowledged) is that sometimes the government SHOULD protect non-competent humans from making bad decisions... the only question is which shade of grey you think society should draw the line on.
> No it doesn't because taxation isn't a la carte; it's a fictional scenario.
Please read it again. I'm describing the system we DO have, and explaining how it is already preventing the society from making quote-unquote-"wrong" choices with their money.
Yes we should protect those who can't make those choices for themselves, but that's already the norm, there'd be a legal age no matter what we come up with. The interesting debate is what we allow adults to do, I consider the children a red herring.
Ok, I reread it, and I'd say providing for national defense was always a core job of government, it's in our constitution. The same is not true of these other things, we've not agreed by an amendment level of agreement that victimless crimes deserve jail. It's just wrong, there's no justification for jailing someone for anything related to what they ingest, who they marry and in what numbers, or anything else where the only direct victim is themselves. I own my body and no one has a right to claim otherwise.
An almost fair point... if and only if we get there, I'm not yet convinced we will, however drug use is not drug abuse. To call it a health issue it'd first have to affect your health negatively. If it does, that can be seen by the doctor and noted and then maybe you can be taxed higher to compensate, but use is not abuse.
Also, serious abuse could save tax payers money by killing you. So just because something affects your health negatively doesn't mean it costs more over your lifetime.
> Gambling is often predatory to the poorer classes of society. Depending on how you're defining victim, low-income-earners could be seen as victims of gambling
I reject the notion that you can be your own victim. If you choose to make decisions that hurt you, you must suffer the consequences; it is not the state's place to protect you from yourself. Jumping out of a perfectly good air plane is legal, and has a very high chance of killing you compared to other hobbies but we don't outlaw that.
> Bigamy is historically correlated with misogyny.
Not a reason to make it a crime. I'm allowed to hate things.
> Also, ironically, bigamy is not a violation of christian morality; there are myriad examples of one-man-many-woman relationships in the Bible
It's a violation of modern Christian morality; times change and so do the church's sense of morals.