In my essay, I discuss if society is being over-regulated by arguing three questions. My aim is to find out if society is being over-regulated and if we are helpless to stop such things or helpless to fight against such regulation. I discuss law regulations, health regulations and Internet regulations in my essay.
Is it too easy to break the law?
Breaking the law is very easy because all it takes is an action. The question is whether a person stands a big chance of getting caught for breaking the law. Plenty of people break the law in one way or another, such as by speeding or downloading from YouTube, but only a minority of people get caught. This suggests that breaking the law is easy and getting away with it is easy too. (Curtis, 1999).
On the other hand, the ability to get away with a crime is often determined by the seriousness of the crime. When a person commits a bigger crime, then the police are given a bigger budget to bring the person in. For example, the budget that police have for catching small-time drug dealers is robust, but it is still small compared to the budget the police have for catching murderers. Such standards suggest that breaking the law and getting away with it is easier if your crimes are smaller and less destructive. (Drucker, 1984).
Are we being forced to take our health seriously?
There are taxes on things that people enjoy, such as tobacco and alcohol. Such rules suggest that people are being forced to take a healthier attitude because they have to pay more if they wish to indulge in things that are commonly perceived as bad for them. The government has no reason to add extra taxes to these items except to dissuade people from using them or doing them. A similar point may be made for book reading since there are no taxes on books in many countries. (McNeill, 1986).
On the other hand, the only people being regulated in this case are people who cannot afford to indulge. Plus, there are many cases where people will happily miss paying bills or eating good food so that they may afford things such as alcohol and tobacco. Despite the fact that extra taxes encourages people to take their healht a little more seriously, it doesn’t actually stop people from indulging and in many cases it makes their lives a little more unhealthy because they cannot afford good food or heat. (Kenkel, 1996).
How regulated are things such as the Internet?
The Internet is becoming more and more regulated these days. For example, there are many websites that people in certain countries are unable to access without the use of VPN because their government has made it impossible. The government has set up laws that cause Internet service providers to deny access to certain websites. It is clear that the government knows of websites that they do not want us to visit, and so they regulate the system and ban such websites so that people may not access them. (Douglas, 2002).
On the other hand, there are still ways to gain access to blocked sites. Until the government starts to ban things such as the dark web or VPN, then they are not really regulating the Internet–they are simply making it more difficult for people to do what they want to do. (Helman, 2010).
Conclusion
It is clear that our society is being heavily regulated to the point where personal freedoms are being infringed. However, there appears to be a way around mostly all of the safeguards and systems that the government has set in place. We are being regulated excessively, but at the moment, we are not helpless to fight back.
Bibliography
Drucker, Peter F. “Converting social problems into business opportunities: The new meaning of corporate social responsibility.” California management review 26.2 (1984): 53-63.
Helman, Lital. “Pull Too Hard and the Rope May Break: On the Secondary Liability of Technology Providers for Copyright Infringement.” Tex. Intell. Prop. LJ 19 (2010): 111.
Kenkel, Donald S. “New estimates of the optimal tax on alcohol.” Economic Inquiry 34.2 (1996): 296-319.
McNeill, L., and J. R. Talley. “Tax-free alcohol.” Hospital pharmacy 21.4 (1986): 335-337.
Sarah Curtis. Children who Break the Law, Or, Everybody Does it. Waterside Press, 1999.
Thomas, Douglas. “New ways to break the law: cybercrime and the politics of hacking.” Criminology: A Reader (2002): 387.
