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Don’t make me act like my Mama shirt

Libertarian minarchists, and Don’t make me act like my Mama shirt, recognize the difference between malum in se and malum prohibitum. Is something inherently wrong, or is it wrong merely because somebody says so? Malum in se is a pretty straightforward and readily grasped concept. Malum prohibitum easily becomes a convoluted mess; one must know the entire code of law and regulation in order to determine whether something may be a crime. And that code is currently around 80,000 pages. Nobody, not even experts, can even count the laws. As the nation has trended ever more to malum prohibitum it loses focus upon central functions of government.

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