John Singleton with Bob HowardRip Van Australia (Stanmore: Cassell Australia, 1977), pp. 59-62, under the heading “Crime”.

Crime doesn’t pay (at least it wouldn’t if the government ran it).

An action is a crime if it violates the individual rights of another person or group of people. This, of course, necessitates the defining of these rights (see Rights). The main rights are those to life, liberty and property. Other rights, such as freedom of speech and movement, can be grouped under one of these three. There can, therefore, be no such thing as “a crime against society”. There can only be crimes against individuals. Although society is a group of individuals, “society” as such has no rights. Only the individuals that make up “society” have rights.

The concept of crimes against society is a very misleading one, because it removes the emphasis from the individual to the abstract group, and as such is a useful device for all sorts of political demagoguery.

The two most obvious implications of this definition of crime as only possible against individuals are that: (1) a vast amount of legislation is not directed at preventing crimes, but instead at regulating perfectly moral human behaviour, and (2) that this gives rise to the category of victimless activities called “crimes”. It is in this area that we see the enormous gulf that currently separates morality from legality.

An enormous number of activities that are illegal are by no means immoral. It is perfectly good fun to bet at the government monopoly TAB. But we are told it is illegal and immoral to make the same bet with an individual.

The subject of crime should also get us thinking about the proper role of government. The original intention was that the function of government was to protect individual rights. Full stop. However, now that more government activity is directed towards regulating moral human behaviour, government itself has become the prime violator of individual rights.

Victimless activities (“crimes”) are usually thought only to encompass such things as homosexuality, gambling, prostitution and drug use. However, they also include all other instances of regulations preventing or regulating forms of moral behaviour, such as trading restrictions on businesses, licensing requirements, penalties for tax evasion, and so on, ad nauseum. Whose rights are violated by prostitutes? gamblers? homosexuals? shopkeepers opening out of hours? pubs selling beer after “official closing time”? bakers baking bread “out of hours”?

Any and all of these transactions could involve real crime only if one of the parties involved resorted to fraud, robbery, extortion, or some other form of force. But while it is a voluntary trade, there is no moral crime. Only immoral laws.

The government is the real criminal. Examples, for starters: taxation is extortion (tax evasion is only self-defence), inflation is fraud (counterfeiting) on a massive scale, devaluation is robbery, national service is kidnapping and/or slavery; ditto compulsory education. Of course, there are any number of “practical” arguments against these assertions, but no principled ones.

A society must have rules to function. We need law. But the only law we need is that which protects individual rights. We do not need imposed regulation. That is the sign of a totalitarian regime, not a free country. It is this imposed regulation that is destroying Australia.

Where regulation is necessary, it need not be externally imposed. People are capable of organising their own affairs and the best incentives for sensible regulations are recognition of private property and the essential profit motive of the free market. In any organisation (including any society) unnecessary or ridiculous regulations manifest themselves as inefficiency and lower profits, (for example, as in public service bureaucracies; Australia Post; B.H.P., any car company; in fact, any soft, fat, protected company or statutory board).

Because of the huge category of victimless “crimes”, our governments have succeeded in turning most of the population into theoretical legal criminals (how many people fill out totally honest tax returns for example) and has, in fact, led to a tremendous increase in real crime as well.

For example, take the prohibition of booze in the 1920s U.S.A., Al Capone, gang wars, massive police and political corruption, were all the result of that. Why? The answer is obvious enough. When any government prohibits anything people want (no matter how few want it), and slaps a penalty on its use, a number of economic and psychological consequences follow: (1) it becomes more attractive to certain people, particularly the rebellious young; (2) the supply decreases because of the higher risks in providing it; (3) because of increased demand, decreased supply and higher risks, a dramatic price increase occurs; (4) all involved become criminals and this, plus the huge potential profits because of (3), results in organised crime with its extortion, stand over men, gang-wars, and so on; (5) the activity is driven underground, which results in such things as increased health risks because of poorer products or general lack of cleanliness; and (6) the way is paved for widespread corruption of the police forces and the governments — local, State and Federal.

The end result of such prohibition, of course, is a far greater problem than that which it was intended to solve. The original problem is still there, plus the legal crime. So not only are all such laws immoral, they are also impractical.

Another aspect of these regulative laws is that they provide an avenue for the persecution of one group of the population by another. Why should homosexuals be hounded as they have been? Why should the Reverend Fred Nile and the Festival of Light be allowed to persecute people who enjoy pornography? Haven’t even (or especially) the supposed Christians learned the terror of persecution? Indeed, this raises yet another curious aspect of the laws. It is the laws prohibiting pornography that help create the pornography industry. It is the laws against drugs which create the drug supply industry. It is the laws that create the profits and the demand.

Because people were for so long not allowed to see the naked human body, and the whole sexual atmosphere was so repressive, there arose a natural and understandable curiosity about nudity and sex. The repression over so many years succeeded, in too many cases, in causing this natural desire to manifest itself in unhealthy ways; that is, in the demand for pornography, perversion, and so on. And also it was, probably, often the cause of the real crimes of rape and sexual assault.

An examination of most of these arguments for victimless “crime” legislation will show that most of these arguments are based on the premise of guilty until proven innocent. This is a complete perversion of the original principle of our law, and it is a cause of great alarm to see how far it has proceeded.

If we are eventually able to remove the regulatory laws from the statute books and completely eliminate victimless “crimes”, not only will we have a healthier, free society, but we will also have a safer one, because the police and courts could then devote all their time and energies to preventing real crimes.