Legalize Drunk Driving

Cheers to that. Good stuff by Lew from a few years back.

Now, the immediate response goes this way: drunk driving has to be illegal because the probability of causing an accident rises dramatically when you drink. The answer is just as simple: government in a free society should not deal in probabilities. The law should deal in actions and actions alone, and only insofar as they damage person or property.

Bank robbers may tend to wear masks, but the crime they commit has nothing to do with the mask. In the same way, drunk drivers cause accidents but so do sober drivers, and many drunk drivers cause no accidents at all. The law should focus on violations of person and property, not scientific oddities like blood content.

Here is another article on the subject that came out yesterday.

Sure, drunken drivers might crash into other cars or innocent pedestrians, but they haven't done it yet. So how can they be arrested for doing nothing? All they have done is violate a law, the reasonableness of which is open to question. With apologies to the likes of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, how can drunken driving itself be a crime? No one has been injured, no property damaged. How can it be a crime simply to drive badly (i.e., impaired) according to the state's definition?