Quote from: DannyHamilton on August 21, 2012, 04:29:45 PM

Quote from: Coreadrin_47 on August 21, 2012, 04:22:07 PM

Well, then you are dealing with moral hazard before anything else.

Let me put my position another way. If I build a road and people have the choice of whether or not to pay me to use it, if I decide to impose a speed limit of 90mph on it, am I right to do this? What if I decide to impose no speed limit? Am I also right to do this?

You aren't answering the question, and your new example has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. The discussion involves an individual choosing to exceed a publicly determined speed limit on a public road. If you build a private road you can do whatever you want with it as far as I'm concerned. Speed limit 1 mph, speed limit 250 mph. Death penalty to those that exceed your speed limit. As long as the rules, consequences, and costs are clearly known ahead of time by anyone choosing to use your road, I really don't care.

But you are stating that a speeder on a public road is not commiting a crime, since there is no victim. I'm asking you to defend your position. You state that the shooter example is a moral hazard. That may be true, but do you consider this a crime?

A crime must have a victim. You can't say "society" is a victim - prove it! The burden of proof must always rest on the accuser. I can easily produce ten people who would say "I was not harmed in any way by this gentleman's speeding" just as easily as you could produce ten that say "society has been hurt by this fellow who didn't actually hurt any individual human being!". What do you have to go on at that point? Consensus? Where does that lead?

The moral hazard exists in the fact that I have a gun pointed at my face that says I must pay for these things whether I use them or not, and then another gun pointed at my face saying that, if I do decide to use them, I must use them in this specific way, even though nobody actually owns them, and that if I don't conform my behavior to these things over which I have no say, and nobody has a demonstrable moral right to attempt to impose in the first place, it is a "crime".