We have too many laws and too many busy-bodies wishing to force others into conformity with their own moral and  behavioral strictures. It is more excessive in some jurisdictions than others, but the unnecessary criminalization of harmless behavior is a spreading canker. The death of Eric Garner  in New York City exemplifies the horrible consequences, an aspect which sets it apart from the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Last week, Mark Perry posted links and summaries of three essays on Garner’s death “and what it teaches us about over-criminalization, government force, police brutality, the regulatory superstate, and the violence of the state.”

Both the Brown and Garner cases involved tobacco products, a primary target of busy-bodies worldwide. Garner was choked to death by police who restrained him for violating a law against selling individual cigarettes (“loosies”). Brown, then a suspect in a strong-arm convenience store theft of Swisher cigarillos, was shot by an officer claiming that Brown charged him in the street after a physical altercation moments earlier. Both incidents are said to have involved excessive force by police toward African Americans, but grand juries refused to indict the officers in both cases. Whether excessive force was used against Brown or Garner, or whether racism was involved, a major contrast is that the Garner case involved the enforcement of a law that seems ridiculously petty.

The three links provided by Perry are from:

• J.D. Tuccille, who argues that over-regulation of behavior not only leads to conflict but also encourages corruption in law enforcement.
• Randy Soave, who discusses the incentive structure faced by police and the extent of over-regulation, “from cigarettes to sodas of a certain size, unlicensed lemonade stands, raw milk, alcohol (for teens), marijuana, food trucks, taxicab alternatives, and even fishing supplies (in schools)“.
• Jonah Goldberg, who elaborates on a simple truism: if you pass a new law, it must be enforced. Enforcement means force, and force is what government is all about. Therefore, if you insist on more detailed control over others, you can expect some violence.

Michael Munger makes the same point, condemning both the left and the right for their failure to understand the simple but far-reaching flaw in our polity:

“The left is outraged that the state is not doing exactly what the left expects from an idealized, unicorn state. In fact, the state is actually made up of actual human-style people, and people are flawed. The left wants to rely on abstract systems, and then be perpetually astonished when things go really wrong. It’s not bad people that are the problem. The THING, the thing itself is the abuse, folks…. The right is just denying that there is a problem, the system is working, the jury has spoken, etc.”

In “Worse Than Racism,” Eric Raymond discusses Garner’s death in the context of Alexis de Tocqueville’s  “soft despotism,” our penchant for promulgating rules for others “all justified in soothing ways to achieve worthy objectives. Such as discouraging people from smoking by heavily taxing cigarettes. Eric Garner died in a New York minute because ‘soft despotism’ turned hard enough to kill him in cold blood.”

Raymond presses hard:

“Every one of the soft despots who passed that law should be arraigned for the murder of Eric Garner. They directed the power of the state to frivolous ends, forgetting – or worse, probably not caring – that the enforcement of those ‘small complicated rules’ depends on the gun, the truncheon, and the chokehold. 

But we are all accessories before the fact. Because we elected them. We ceded them the power to pass oh, so many well-intentioned laws, criminalizing so much behavior that one prominent legal analyst has concluded the average American commits three inadvertent felonies a day.”

Finally, here’s an interesting connection: research  advocating high taxation of cigarettes  was published in 2008 by none other than Jonathan Gruber. Yes, the architect of Obamacare who often gloated on camera at academic conferences about the clever lack of transparency in the health care law and the stupidity of the American voter. He was also busy providing a rationale for the morality meddlers to more heavily tax and regulate “unacceptable” behavior. It is fitting and ironic that such an infamous elitist as Gruber has a connection to the soft despotism that led to the death of Eric Garner.