Legislating the problem, not the infinite roads that may lead there

I agree with the concept that government is best which governs least. However it was only in recent years of my life that I realized the flawed methods of governance that most people never even consider. Most laws, including in the U.S., are written to ban the causes of problems, in order to prevent the effects (the problems themselves).

The problem with this methodology is there are many causes that may lead to a single undesired effect, which requires making many laws without ever fully solving the problem. Further, with each law banning a supposed cause, it forbids people from doing what may lead to no problems at all. 

As a matter of practicality, if one wanted to choose the most effective methodology in legislating against undesired effects, it would seem banning the effect itself, not the many potential causes, would be preferable. Not only does it directly address the actual problem, it requires no revisions for new causes that surface, because the effect is still banned. It saves a lot of time, money, and paperwork if one law can simultaneously replace dozens or thousands, and doesn't have lawsuit ready side-effects that require permits and caveats for all the causes that are banned that also have completely innocuous effects.

If this is all too vague, I'll describe the example that converted me to the new way of thinking of governance, drunk driving. Drunk driving is harshly punished in America, and it happens a hell of a lot, so not a bad example to work with. Its effect is also potentially horrific, so it's a good example of a law that virtually none would disagree with. But some people do. And that's something I found compelling. In reading the reasoning why some are opposed to a law against drunk driving, I had to completely rethink how I viewed the purpose and effectiveness of laws.

The cause; being drunk and driving. The effect; car accidents, sometimes fatal car accidents. We ban the cause, to hopefully reduce the effect. But as I pointed out before, banning causes only bans some ways an effect may occur. Car accidents happen all the time without any alcohol involved at all.

In any given dangerous or detrimental event, there are several major reasons why. It's ironic that often people in society have captured this idea and then concluded "no excuses" is a better policy, but not with law making. We entirely focus on excuses. So let's look at them, and how they may result in a car crash. The first, and worst, is malicious intent. Someone consciously driving dangerously. This is also the most rare reason for car crashes. But malicious behavior is the one nobody minds "throwing the book" at someone for. In the scheme of justice and law enforcement, if someone has acted maliciously, punishment is almost always the harshest and little guilt is felt by those who deal it.

The second is ignorance or incompetence. This has to do with someone being unskilled in driving. Either because they lack the training, the skills, or because they have simply failed to adhere to training. When a child crashes a car, that's pure ignorance, and we can find no fault in the child, because the child should have never been allowed near the car in the first place. If someone is incompetent, we hold them somewhat to blame, but if they had been granted a driver license, it's also the fault of those who allowed the person on the road to begin with. But moving away from gross ignorance and incompetence is a grey area where situations present themselves that some may be able to deal with safely, while others may crash. This seems to happen a lot, and we call them "accidents".

Calling an event an accident is acknowledging that nobody intended it to occur, and that to some extent, everyone involved had some valid justification to do what they were doing up until perhaps the final decisions were made. Often times the catalyst to these accidents is weather, or mechanical failure. Of course to the most critical people, there are no "accidents", if you skid in wet weather, you're simply unprepared, and you should have trained to not hydroplane. If your tire blows out, it's your fault for not doing regular preventative maintenance. There's obviously a truth to this, but it's a sliding scale, and there are very few laws that punish people for causing "accidents". People who cause them may be punished in other ways, but not usually criminally. We as a society give a pass to this, admitting humans err.

The third is negligence or laziness. Where ignorance ends and negligence begins is a tough one for outsiders to discern, but the distinguishing characteristic between the two is that negligence and laziness involve a person who knows better, but through inaction or poor reaction, still ends up driving dangerously or crashing. This is where drunk driving fits. Someone intentionally gets drunk, and then, knowing full well that being drunk means being impaired in the ability to properly manage a vehicle, does that very thing. It's also where actions like street racing may be categorized. Street racers may be fully capable of driving safely, and yet choose to drive very dangerously, while simultaneously having no desire to harm.

Since we seek to punish laziness and negligence, but not ignorance for the most part, there are hurdles governments put in place to try to distinguish the two. Requiring a driver license is a way of testing the capabilities of a driver, thus establishing them on record. Should the person fail to react properly in a real situation, the license should presumably help one conclude that the driver was acting negligently, since they had already proven capable of handling the situation. When it comes to drunk driving, rather than negligence bordering on ignorance, it is negligence bordering on maliciousness. If one knows they are dangerous as a drunk driver, and still consciously choose to get drunk and drive, there is some malicious intent involved, though there is also the issue of self delusion in one's ability to perform, particularly when one is already drunk.

We accept as humans that bad things will happen. But we also vigorously attempt to mitigate it. While ignorance is an issue that will exist in perpetuity as each new human must be taught, negligence or malicious intent subvert the best efforts of society. You can't teach someone to not crash while driving maliciously or negligently because those very actions are a conscious rejection of what one knows to be proper. In a court of law "you should know better" oddly is a very powerful phrase. 

You take all of this into account, just on the topic of car accidents and how impacting does banning drunk driving seem? You're still left with ignorant, lazy, and even malicious drivers crashing. You haven't covered drugged up drivers, either with legal or illegal substances. You haven't covered bad drivers who are driving in a new area with challenges they aren't capable of handling. You aren't covering sleepy drivers, who can be even more deadly than drunk ones.

But the can of worms hasn't even been opened yet. What is drunk driving? In the realm of true Political Science, this is where scientific study would provide law makers with data on effective means of determining sobriety, and how drunk someone may become before they should be considered too drunk to safely drive.

Fascinatingly with alcohol, and pretty much JUST alcohol, it's rather easy to come up with an effective test that tests current sobriety. Unlike negligence, maliciousness, or even the use of other drugs, where there's virtually no test that can objectively determine a level of impairment. While it is illegal to get high on marijuana or heroin and drive, (and not just because the drugs themselves are illegal) there's no simple way of actually determining someone is high. With alcohol you have both blood tests and breathalyzers. You could find other drugs in a blood test, but even after a high is gone and a person is completely sober they can test positive for drugs in their blood.

With all of this going for it, there are still problems with prosecuting a ban on drunk driving. Because even with an effective means of determining how much alcohol someone has in them, this doesn't directly correlate to their driving ability. Numbers vary wildly. Particularly between alcoholics and people who rarely drink. Take an alcoholic who also drives professionally or competitively and get them drunk, they still may perform magnitudes better than someone who falls below the "legal limit" on a drunk test, but whose driving skills aren't near what the drunk guy possesses. Adam Carolla believed this to be the case and actually tested it once with the help of law enforcement. He got hammered on alcohol, well above legally drunk, and then outperformed people who had only a little bit of alcohol in them. He drove safely and effectively while drunk, and they failed while "legally" sober. So even with an established "drunk level" like .08, in individual cases, you're failing to address the problem. The same problem in all of these cases, regardless of WHY.

Why is irrelevant. It's a crapshoot. It leads to so much debate, effort, paperwork, money, and worst of all it can lead to people being prosecuted who were never any danger. Adam Carolla's test showed that he could be jailed, fined, and punished in many other ways for being "legally drunk" while driving, meanwhile he could objectively not only be a safe driver, but actually outperform people who aren't "legally" drunk, who themselves should be the ones labelled drunk. To some .09% is perfectly fine, no impairment, or none that matters. To others, .05% is drunk, and they may cause a crash while driving. Law enforcement and law makers have already figured out this "drunk" fallacy, which is why if someone is pulled over for driving dangerously, but only show for example a .05, they can STILL get a DUI. Because of their alcoholic level, in addition to their actual inability to drive. This admits the system is flawed, without bothering to protect those on the other end who weren't a danger.

So what is the simple answer? What is the law that I'm claiming addresses the effect and doesn't get mired in trying to ban causes?

Ban dangerous driving.

WHY someone is driving dangerously is irrelevant. Dangerous driving can lead to crashes, injuries, and death. Dangerous driving by one person removes from other innocent people the ability to choose to safely drive. Dangerous drivers kill safe drivers.

We appreciate that ignorance is a mitigating circumstance, but for the most part, ignorance doesn't lead to dangerous driving, ignorance instead leads to a safe driver who can't react in a particular way to an unsafe condition. Dangerous driving is driving that may initiate a crash. Ignorant or incompetent driving probably won't cause a crash, but it may fail to prevent one. So in those instances, there are either events or people who are more to blame than the ignorant driver. Sometimes an ignorant or incompetent driver may create a dangerous situation for others as a response to another driver or event, but all of this is usually discernible, and society has decided that ignorance gets somewhat of a pass.

Ban dangerous driving, and it pretty much entirely takes care of the problem. BAC of .10 and you're driving home entirely safely, then you're not a dangerous driver. BAC of .05 and you're swerving between lanes, you're a dangerous driver, you get punished. Dangerously cutting lanes to be a dick, or to get to work 2 minutes earlier, or because it's fun, none of it matters. If you crash from dangerous driving, "why" becomes moot. "How bad" is the real question. If one person kills another after plowing into them with a car, "Why" is not the top question. The person is dead regardless.

There is also an oddity to drunk driving that presents a contradiction in our justice system. This is worth pointing out as one of the many tangled knots justice may encounter when the policy is to ban causes and not effects. When it comes to drunk driving, generally society sees this as a nearly malicious act, one consciously choosing to put one's self and others in danger by deciding to drive after having gotten drunk- We see a drunk driving accident as criminal, compared to a sober idiot crashing. Yet we do not hold the same standard elsewhere. When it comes to sex, especially in the psychotically liberal PC realm of colleges that have manifested a sort of alternative justice system entirely around this one topic, being drunk makes one an instant and permanent victim, entirely blameless in all actions. Unless the person is a man, then they're still guilty. This was literally the claim made in a mandatory alcohol awareness lesson required of all Cal students, that when a woman drinks, she becomes a rape victim, when a man drinks, he becomes a rapist.

If a woman gets hammered on liquor to the point of black out drunk, then tries to simply go home via the method she arrived, her car, society condemns her, especially more so the more dire the consequences of this decision. Yet if a woman has even a single sip of alcohol, by the laws of the psychotic, she is immediately a rape victim if she instead chooses to engage sexually with a man. People actually believe this. That to be even slightly drunk is a complete elimination of free will, but somehow if the subsequent actions of this person are actually harmful, not sexual, then we blame the person MORE. Not just driving, but anything, fighting verbally or physically, even merely talking or walking in public there are specific laws with greater punishments for drunk people. But if the drunk woman chooses sex rather than criminality, she's immediately and completely a rape victim.

This is a folly of focusing on causes not effects. It's true SOME rape occurs in the context of a criminal exploiting an inebriated victim, however merely being inebriated is not logically then creating an instant victim, nor is the person having sex with a drunk person an instant rapist, no matter how shrill the voice claiming this to be so. It's an effort to ban every way in which rape may occur. Rather than simply a ban on forced sexual encounters, regardless of circumstance. If you ban the effect, not the cause, you don't need excuses, or justification, and the criminal has none of their own. But better still, you don't need to hang the innocent along with the guilty in casting a wide net. Rather than trying to declare more and more things "rape" in order to prevent it, rape should just be the actual focus and excuses shouldn't be tolerated.

The government governing best and least is wise to follow this principle, to focus on addressing effects, not causes. In the two crimes I mentioned before, in the simple government, you have two laws, 1. Do not drive dangerously, 2. Do not act sexually upon another without consent. Two laws. No caveats. No excuses. To act in the manner that is harmful or violating IS THE CRIME. And there's no debating it. There's no innocents being dragged along. There's no guilty people getting off on technicalities, because instead of hundreds or thousands of laws being written to try to ban all the various nuanced causes, just the thing that is actually the problem is directly addressed.

One might think such a simple law is too simplistic for our justice system-
 Quite the opposite. The entire existence of courts, judges, and juries is perfectly suited to handle simple laws that average people can look at and make rational decisions upon. What befuddles juries, and pisses off judges is nuanced thousand page laws that nobody can quite understand or discern.

In a system that must always favor the deference to innocence, choosing to pass laws on causes not effects is backwards. It makes innocent people of those criminals who fall between the cracks (for example someone high on bath salts while driving because the law hasn't caught up with them yet, so they get off completely), and it makes criminal those innocents who are caught in a wide-cast net (making all sexual activity rape if any alcohol is involved means even two loving consenting married adults who had some wine at dinner, proceed to "rape" each other based on zero tolerance laws).

Even if you can make the excuse that you can go back and re-write and tweak the laws to protect the innocent, you must first harm innocent people to be inspired to do it, then a hell of a lot of legal battling by innocents must ensue, over and over in perpetuity to get the caveats needed. Meanwhile the same must be done to keep catching criminals who exploit the loopholes. Or you could just trust that by criminalizing the actual problem, our massive justice system might be able to handle it just fine. And if the "why" truly has a mitigating or enhancing effect, that reasonable people and precedent in court proceedings can far better deal with the thousands of potential "whys" than thousands of set laws can.