But at best these will be estimates. We have to wait for the government to administer a test to tell us whether or not we are criminals. That s not the way law is supposed to work. Indeed, this is a form of tyranny. The law should deal in actions and actions alone, and only insofar as they damage person or property.
Probabilities are something for insurance companies to assess on a competitive and voluntary basis.
Government should be preventing and punishing crimes themselves, not probabilities and propensities. Neither, then, should we have driver profiling, which assumes that just because a person has quaffed a few he is automatically a danger. In fact, driver profiling is worse than racial profiling, because the latter only implies that the police are more watchful, not that they criminalize race itself. Despite the propaganda, what s being criminalized in the case of drunk driving is not the probability that a person driving will get into an accident but the fact of the blood-alcohol content itself. A drunk driver is humiliated and destroyed even when he hasn t done any harm.