Often people think every issue has just one possible solution, and that is voting, referendums. Voting for every other issue they think will solve the problem.
What they ignore is the most important principle of voting or democracy, democracy is not a tool of subverting Individual liberty, it is a tool to establish liberty of Individual the smallest minority, now since they forget this basic principle, they start acting like another dictator.
In the last post, one of my friend suggested that people should vote to decide whether a person could sell alcohol or not. His argument is driving after drinking may cause accidents.
Now let us discuss his idea.
A person after drinking alcohol, drives and may commit a mistake under the effect of alcohol and cause a gruesome accident that caused injuries to some people.
It is a crime, and who is the criminal?
1> Driver is the criminal, he was driving and committed mistake, he should be punished (monetarily or other ways).
2> Driver is actually not the criminal, alcohol is the criminal, if he was not in affect of alcohol, and he might not have caused accident. Alcohol can not be punished.
3> Alcohol¹ can not be termed as the criminal, actually, the person who sells alcohol is the criminal, if he had not sell alcohol, the driver might not have drunk and that might have aborted accident. Thus, the alcohol seller must be punished; Ban alcohol shops and announce selling alcohol as crime
So, which of the three ideas is reasonable?
First of all, the assumption that alcohol causes accidents is wrong, because if it is not wrong, why people of UK, France, Thailand, Malaysia, USA, Russia, Germany, India, and most of other countries do not ban alcohol. Yet, let us assume it is a point.
According to my friend, the third one is right. I see no sense in all that.
First of all, blaming the alcohol is not correct; alcohol cannot think nor can act. The person who drives after drinking alcohol is the decider of his actions.
Third option is extremely ridiculous, why should we punish the dealer of alcohol for a crime, which he never did? Why should we abort his way to earn a living? It does not make sense, moreover it is against the Individual liberty of a person, and it is against his right to act.
Now consider this fact, more road accidents are caused because of mobiles, people use mobile phones during driving which causes accidents. Alcoholic driving causes much less number of accidents.
Thus, as per the common suggestion, there should be a referendum to ban mobile phones too just like alcohol?
Anyways, one may say that although it is correct that mobiles causes much more number of accidents than alcohol does, but alcohol is injurious to health, hence we should have a referendum to ban alcohol.
Let us assume that this idea also wins approval, and there occurs a referendum to decide whether selling of alcohol be abolished or not, and let us assume that people decide to ban alcohol shops, dealers and sellers.
Now consider banning.
If you ban an alcohol seller, although he is making profits, he will start black-marketing, you will engage police, he will bribe them and still will make profit because people want alcohol, they buy it, and he provide them.
You make strict laws, he make more keen ways to black-market and bribe further more policeman, he make his gang, and then you make smuggling laws, although people are consuming alcohol and they want alcohol, that is why he is making profits. So, you waste people’s collected tax, they are now suffering under your totalitarian hands, your taxes and Non productive activities to restrict him from selling alcohol are causing burden on people, making them poorer, because you take extra taxes from them to stop the alcohol seller and many others who smuggle alcohol.
That is, you are punishing all, no matters they drink alcohol or not, but they are bearing and suffering the punishment. You loot them through taxes, make them poor and decrease their potential to create jobs to remove poverty of other workers. That is, just for the sake of your ill-logic of banning alcohol, you make whole society suffer, and you nor the society ever realizes this fact, although all keep crying against poverty.
Ultimately, you succumb, and you announce a law to shoot anyone who sells alcohol, but why? Why should not you shoot anyone who drinks alcohol? Therefore, you get that idea too and you announce a law to shoot anyone who touches alcohol, and that is the ultimate point of totalitarianism.
By banning alcohol, you are not only making people poor by looting their hard earned money in form of taxes, so that you may arrest and punish the alcohol seller (which you will find impossible because he will bribe and use other ways as he is right), you are also causing possibilities of mass murders.
So what is the result of all this, poverty, wastage of resources, corruption, bribing? In addition, even after all bans, alcohol will keep making its ways.
Let us say that the alcohol seller/smuggler reaches a point where he need to bribe the police and authorities to keep selling alcohol, but his margin of profit is decreasing too much, so what should he do? He start thinking of alternative ways, he start making cheap local wine and adulterating it with the proper healthy alcohol.
Now sometimes the cheap local wine may remain free of intoxication, sometimes it may become a poison, and cause deaths in huge numbers, because people do use alcohol. Who is responsible for those killings, Poisonous wine, or the seller, or the authority that banned the selling of healthy unadulterated wine?
Now let us discuss the market solution of the problem of alcohol.
Selling of alcohol is the Individual’s decision and his right to act. He is not forcing anyone to drink alcohol and if he does so, he will get punishment as enforcing anyone is breach of individual freedom.
Similarly, selling of mobile phones can not be stopped or banned.
Yet, we can have a referendum, and we can keep repeating such referendum in positive ways, the issue of referendum should not be Banning, but establishing the fact, that driving after drinking alcohol or using mobile phones during driving may cause accidents, so people should avoid it.
We spread the positive idea and it helps, it does not cause wastage of resources, nor it makes people poor as the banning of alcohol does.
In addition, lets say majority of people think alcohol is not good, they does not use alcohol, if the number keep increasing freely, the buyers of alcohol also decreases and that makes selling of alcohol a business of loss, hence the market force naturally suggests the alcohol seller to not to sell alcohol. Since he will not be earning anything in free market by selling alcohol, he will not smuggle it too and hence there will not be chances of mass murder due to poisonous alcohol too.
Yet, more than that, the free market force will insure that poverty of citizens may not be increased by the increased taxation for the non-productive activities, and that will decrease the corruption too, as there will not be any need to bribe police for selling alcohol.
When people are so convinced that alcohol is bad, why should alcohol be banned? As all consider alcohol is bad, they should avoid alcohol freely by their own choice and self-determination, why they need a totalitarian DANDA of police and government.
Conclusion: We should not support the idea of establishing laws and bans based on referendum and voting, because referendum and voting are more based on emotions and sentiments. We should design and decide laws on the firm base of provable, explainable REASON, and it is only “Reason” which can promote freedom, referendums are mob rules, they are often used to make slaves. Read more on banning of cigarettes here.

1. Alcohol Addict, Reason for Liberty [↩]