The Law and Society

State Interventions

Typically when one thinks of the words "state interventions," markets and businesses and commerce and exchange come to mind. It is what libertarians and conservatives and economists keep talking about. Some say that these interventions guarantee woe, typically for those the interventions are designed to help. Some say that the interventions are necessary due to moral or utilitarian reasons. What we have discussed so far in class is that the interventions prevent people from seeking their highest valued ends, regardless of whatever that may be. This in turn inhibits entrepreneurship, which harms all of us. Or so we are told.

Legal Codes

Not all state interventions are economic in intent or even in nature. The legal codes that any of us live under are "state interventions" in that they are involuntarily forced upon people and, requiring more effort of the general population, not what most people would normally seek to do. So we see in the movie Dallas Buyers Club.

Source

The Lack of a Legal Code

In Dallas Buyers Club, we are introduced to what might be politely termed the "bottom rung of society." We see a setting with rampant poverty, promiscuity, Confederate Battle Flags, alcohol, drug use, low-class diction, southerners, Whites, cowboy hats, boots, trailer parks... every single Hollywood trope surrounding Hicksploitation is present. Here, there truly are no standards.

But The Laws Existed

The first obvious objection to this will be that most of what happened in this movie that is presented as "good" (the Buyers Club, the working medical treatments, the activities that lead to this in the first place) were all illegal while everything presented as "bad" (the FDA in particular) was legal or the state itself. This is almost entirely irrelevant. When the law is not enforced, it is meaningless. It is just words on paper. For our purpose, the law did not exist in the setting of this movie.

What Would Have Been

Had the law been present and enforced, especially in Texas at this time, the majority of the issues seen in this film would be nonexistent. To start, our protagonist would never have been in this situation because the Texan laws against public obscenity would have prevented the occasion for contracting the STD. The drugs would not have been so present so as to destroy the man's immune system. The prostitutes and brothels would have been done away with. In fact, the whole epidemic would not have come into being had the laws against homosexual activity across the United States simply been enforced instead of specifically the opposite.

But What About...

That's not the spirit of this class, though. I am supposed to write about the greatness of the entrepreneur, our protagonist, in providing value to people in the form of drugs that were being prohibited by the evil, stupid government through the FDA. This framing assumes that a person's subjective value is the highest good, which I entirely reject. A properly functioning society, as the West was for the majority of its millennium-long existence, prohibits certain activities and actions and organizations that actively destroy the society. These prohibitions tend to be on high time preference behavior (like homosexuality, drug use, and drunkenness, and similar behavior). In the case of our movie, had the existing laws been enforced, none of this would have happened, and there would be no need for a Buyers Club. It does not matter the moral standing of our entrepreneur here, the entire movie, and our actual history, is one of foolishness.

Not Just the Legal System

The laws on the books, moral in nature, exist for a reason. These laws are not alone in their prescriptions. Every moral system known to the West prohibited this behavior, and the snapshot of what they warn about that we see in the movie is but a mere glimpse of what is warned of by those moral systems. Adhering to and enforcing them, then, is vital for our society, regardless of the subjective valuations of people.