> Everyone keeps saying how free they are and how great their country is yet you can't even drink an alcoholic beverage on the street without getting arrested. You go to a town festival and the people who want to drink are enclosed in a small area like cattle.
Public space alcohol consumption is one of the weirdest metrics I’ve seen to gauge freedom.
But for what it’s worth, laws regarding public alcohol consumption are a local thing. There are plenty of places in the United States where public alcohol consumption isn’t a crime. And of course, you’re free to drink privately.
But freedom doesn’t mean anarchy. If you want to nit pick individual restrictions on non-speech activities in public spaces then you can find something to complain about every country.
> Public space alcohol consumption is one of the weirdest metrics I’ve seen to gauge freedom.
I would say it's a much more relevant metric than the ability to own a shitload of guns, or to drive a black smoke diesel truck, the latter of which is honestly bafflingly antisocial behavior. The definition of "freedom" should begin with the freedom from others pushing their negative externalities onto you.
I think the attitude might be that we should prohibit and punish the behaviors, not the source. If someone is being belligerent or otherwise disruptive in a public space, whether or not they're drinking alcohol should not be a factor. And if someone is drinking alcohol without being disruptive, is there cause to punish or prohibit their behavior?
Except it should be, because alcoholism is in fact a lethal disease all on its own and frequently overlies serious mental health issues, including things like domestic abuse, drunk driving, etc. Where there’s smoke, look for fire.
But this was about public vs private drinking. Many, if not most, problem drinkers drink in private. Cherry-picking some visible issue X, that may be related to a more complex underlying problem Y, just because it's visible, is called window-dressing and is in general a very ineffective way to try to solve Y (and honestly, solving Y is often not even the goal, marketing speeches notwithstanding).
I think we have a disagreement about the number of problems. I agree with you at to the 0th iteration but in the particular example of alcohol, the externalities are so large, the perturbation is important and we should make sure the model is “as simple as possible, but no simpler”.
So your statement “If someone is being belligerent or otherwise disruptive in a public space, whether or not they're drinking alcohol should not be a factor”
Please find a different example, or, if you believe in the goal of improving human society, please revise that statement. Belligerence and other disruptiveness involving alcohol should be tracked, because it can reveal the deeper problem that is present in some (honestly, many) cases of public belligerence and disruptiveness once a trend is established. Saving lives is important all on it’s own.
> Public space alcohol consumption is one of the weirdest metrics I’ve seen to gauge freedom.
How so? It seems to me that the people's ability to use and enjoy public spaces as they fit (of course unless they intrude on other people's freedom) is at the very heart of what I consider freedom.
> And of course, you’re free to drink privately.
And of course you're free to express your opinion privately, at home, when no one's listening. See the problem with that kind of 'freedom'?
The reason many municipalities ban public drunkenness is because it intrudes upon other people's freedom. Very many people tend to behave badly while drunk!
Many other places deal with that by making behaving badly the thing you're not allowed to do, rather than the activities that sometimes lead people (who partake in them irresponsibly) to behave badly.
> But freedom doesn’t mean anarchy. If you want to nit pick individual restrictions on non-speech activities in public spaces then you can find something to complain about every country.
Anarchism is based on freely agreed rules and organization. It denies rulers, not rules. I find this to be a necessary condition for freedom. So yes, one can find something to complain about pretty much every country if arguing from freedom. The status quo is not a good excuse for lack of freedom, that's just circular reasoning.
I urge everyone not to fall into the trap of the "Us vs Them" rhetoric that almost always leads to more oppression and violence. Trying to quantify freedom is moot. The enemy of freedom is corruption, fear and hate.
Public space alcohol consumption is one of the weirdest metrics I’ve seen to gauge freedom.
But for what it’s worth, laws regarding public alcohol consumption are a local thing. There are plenty of places in the United States where public alcohol consumption isn’t a crime. And of course, you’re free to drink privately.
But freedom doesn’t mean anarchy. If you want to nit pick individual restrictions on non-speech activities in public spaces then you can find something to complain about every country.