In my book “But Who Will Build the Roads?”: Market Anarchy Explained, I used the example of outlawing poker games, because I thought that was something rather trivial that would never happen. Well, oops:
Police in San Mateo County, California apparently first spent months investigating the small-stakes poker game. From this firsthand account, it looks like a couple of the officers were playing regularly for several weeks before sending in the SWAT team, guns drawn, last week. If California is like most states (and I believe it is), a poker game is only illegal if the house is taking a rake off the top. In this case, it looks like that “rake” was the $5 the extra the hosts asked from each buy-in to pay for pizza and beer.
Police also took a 13-year-old girl out of the home, away from her parents, and turned her over to child protective services. In addition to the charge of running an illegal gambling operation, the hosts are also charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Good thing the poor girl was saved before slouching toward an inevitable life of crime.
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Typical, over-reaction by the ‘State’. No half measures, no reason, just irrational ’systems’ doing what is normal to systems. In Gulag Archipelago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn shows how the State gave license to the police to arrest a percentage of their district. When the local cops discovered that they had only arrested 20 people out of the 500 they had license to…they arrested 480 more people to make up the quota. Crazy.
By: roma38 on February 12 2008
at 12:15