October 29, 2026
If you can sift through the disastrous overseas stuff going on right now, you'll be happy to know there's a hot mess at home, too. A great many legislative debates are raging right now concerning what seems like a range of issues, but they all have something in common.
The drug issue is oddly red-hot right now (even being cited as a catalyst for some of the shenanigans abroad). Marijuana classification, prescription opioid regulations, and even reaching over into immigration measures are all in the works to curtail further abuse of fentanyl and other narcotics and the purported crimes that result from it.
Right here (or close by) on social media, we have the RESTRICT Act, plus a plethora (if you don't know that word, stop what you're doing and go watch Three Amigos) of "disinformation" legislation still popping up all over the place, to stop feelings from being hurt and possible violent outbursts from those hurt feelings.
In finance, a whole infrastructure of surveillance, tracking, and monitoring has been constructed. This makes splitting one's cash deposit into several transactions, none exceeding $10,000, to avoid reporting them, a federal crime in itself. Civil asset forfeiture of property whose owners are suspected of criminal activity (that's suspected, no conviction) is also happening in some jurisdictions, and being discussed in others.
Do you see the one underlying connection here ? None of these are inherently harmful acts, but meant to prevent harm before the fact or restrict some means that could be employed to enact it. As the great Jeff Snyder would put it, they're "fighting crime by creating crime".
At first blush, this sounds great. An ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure, right ? If people can't refill their opioid prescriptions, they can't abuse or sell the meds. If you're not allowed to divvy up your cash deposits, they can make sure you're not making shady deals. If you can't post an inflammatory meme, snowflakes' feelings remain unscathed, and dad's rifle stays safely locked away. Speaking of which, such regulations are pushed ad nauseam when it comes to guns. If they can't legally buy assault rifles, the shootings will be less assault-y, or something.
Rather than being purely reactive to the bad things that happen, the state preemptively makes them impossible, so we have a safer society. What could possibly be wrong with that?
Several things, actually. They're detailed perfectly by Snyder, in Nation of Cowards, a book that, no exaggeration, changed the way I think. It focuses on the gun issue, but what it really taught me was first principles thinking. Once you have even a rudimentary grasp of this approach, you realize it goes far beyond guns.
There's no articulating these positions better than Snyder, so here are some of his finer points from the chapter entitled "Fighting Crime by Creating Crime":
Preventative laws violate the presumption of innocence. They, in effect, presume guilt of those engaging in some potentially harm-adjacent act, and place the burden on the actor to prove their innocence by the absence of corroborating evidence, a total inversion of the notion that all suspects are innocent until proven guilty, a principle that provides a crucial check on authoritarianism, and must be integral to criminal justice in anything like a free society.
Depositing more than $10,000 at once harms no one, but the depositor is effectively accused of financial malfeasance and forced to produce the proper records to exonerate themselves. Refilling one's drug prescription is in no sense an act of aggression, but the patient is often flat-out denied the refill, or enjoined to somehow "prove" they're in sufficient pain to warrant it.
Taking a broader view of this legal philosophy (if I may elevate it so), it prescribes the extent of freedom allowed to peaceful, innocent individuals based on the conduct of criminals. By committing crimes and sparking this knee-jerk call to "not let it happen again," the worst among us, by their violent invasive actions, effectively decide what the rest of us are subsequently allowed to do.
Some patients become addicts or dealers of their prescription drugs, so those meds are restricted for everyone. Someone committed financial fraud, so now anyone displaying similar money management patterns can have their assets seized. Someone committed a mass shooting using a certain gun with a bump stock attached, so then they're banned nationwide. In Snyder's words:
"A law which restricts the liberty of the innocent because of the behavior of the guilty, that rests on the principle that the conduct of criminals dictates the scope of liberty the law will allow to the rest of society, in no sense 'fights' crime. For society has permitted its fear of crime, and craving for safety, to turn the force of law against the innocent and law-abiding. Far from FIGHTING crime, the criminalization of otherwise innocent activities represents a society in RETREAT before crime. This is a society desperately accommodating itself to crime."
Furthermore, with the "prevention" line of reasoning, there's no logical stopping point. If we want to prohibit, regulate, and monitor the behaviors that could precede the criminal act-the suspicious money transactions, requesting Percocet refills, buying a rifle, etc.-why not walk it back even a few more steps ? Total monitoring of every stage of every money transfer, mandated questioning under oath for access to opioids, and a total ban on private gun ownership could make us even safer by protecting individuals from their own harmful choices, right?
So, what do these measures really seek to do ? It's about something deeper than interrupting the causation of violence, fraud, and abuse. Again, I defer to Snyder:
"By now it should be evident what the project of all laws that criminalize innocent conduct in order to prevent crime is: to so arrange the material conditions of life that those disposed to act upon their evil intentions will have no means of realizing their designs... THEIR GOAL IS TO MAKE RESPONSIBILITY IRRELEVANT...it won't MATTER whether people act responsibly or not. Their irresponsible intentions will be rendered impotent and irrelevant... How do criminals, how does ANYONE, learn that they are responsible for their actions, if the law is engaged in a mighty project to render it irrelevant whether one does or does not want to act responsibly?"
We've all been susceptible to this type of thinking from time to time. We don't want to believe that the moral choice is to restrain intervention, especially from the state, until and unless actual damage is imminent or has already happened. But this is a fantastical notion that boils down to "I want to make sure nothing bad ever happens in the world". And as much as I'm not fond of empirical rhetorical questions, has the implementation of more preventative laws than anyone can count eliminated all the bad things from happening?
There's a natural tendency to want things situated to guarantee order, stability, and safety. But never forget to consider the costs of making such measures official, which is to say, backed up by the threat of deadly force.
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