Jack Kervorkian, a champion of personal freedom who helped people die the way they wanted to die, died two days ago of natural causes. John Delaney, an entrepeneur who ran an online current events betting site (www.intrade.com), died last week on the top of Mount Everest. Both of these men made careers out of helping people engage in harmless activities which were nonetheless illegal or legally restricted in the U.S. I hope that in my lifetime, both euthanasia and online betting will be declared legal. Both are activities that I might at some point want to engage in (I already do want to bet online), and I am bothered that the government wants to get in my way.
I am, however, more bothered by the legal obstructions to online gambling than by the illegality of suicide. Besides the fact that I am much more inclined towards gambling than assisted suicide, another key reason is that online gambling, unlike suicide, is an activity that I’d like to use to enhance my life on a continuous basis, from my own home in the U.S. If I were ever to decide I wanted a doctor to help me die peacefully, I’d just take a trip to the Netherlands and work with a doctor there (it would be somewhat of an inconvenience, but it could certainly be done).
Any law which bans one-off activities like suicide can be skirted through the marketplace of nations. (In order to take advantage of this marketplace, a person needs to have enough money for a plane ticket, and to live in a country that allows its citizens to travel abroad – which is just about everywhere.) A law, on the other hand, which bans lifestyle choices such as gambling, is truly oppressive.
In addition to euthenasia laws, other laws that can be rendered almost irrelevant through travel are laws banning certain types of surgery, laws banning abortion (although this one is time sensitive so it can’t always be gotten around quite as conveniently), laws restricting banking secrecy (you actually don’t even need to travel to take advantage of these I believe), laws banning torture by government (“extraordinary rendition” is the way to get around this), etc.
Online gambling on current events is of course not in this category, and it is something I really wish were unequivocally legal – the legality/convenience of online betting is one of the few political issues that are actually relevant to my day-to-day happiness (the other big one being taxes; almost all other political issues of today are not very relevant at all to my happiness level in concrete terms, i.e. they are only relevant to me insofar as it feels good to be subject to laws which conform to my ideology). However, the amazing thing to me is that, not only do other people not seem to care enough about this issue to pressure politicians to make it legal to operate online gambling sites (which is clearly illegal), the government doesn’t even bother to tell people whether the use of online gambling sites is legal or not! Delaney, the operator of the betting site who just died, asked the U.S. government whether it was legal or not, and apparently they simply ignored him! Barney Frank wrote a bill to clarify and loosen up laws around online gambling, and it just fizzled. If the stock market were banned, people would go crazy. People argue all day long about predictions about the future (much more than they argue about future stock prices) — why aren’t they bothered that they aren’t free to put there money where there mouth is on Intrade?
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