[nickgeiger]

Great point, making something illegal doesn't stop it, but it just raises the price. Drugs come to mind as I read this. It becomes a problem to me when making something illegal raises the cost to society overall versus actually solving whatever problem it claimed to solve. Again, drugs is a great example because we have great costs as a society for law enforcement and prisons dedicated to making drugs illegal versus quite possibly less costs if at least some drugs were legal.

To tie this back to the issue, I think SOPA taxes the Google's, Facebook's, etc of the world in an attempt to deal with piracy, which will only increase our costs as citizens for those services and not really solve the problem. Similarly, we also pay taxes to imprison drug offenders whilst drugs continue to be consumed at will.

[earbitscom]

Making something illegal that people want to pay for raises the price higher and we probably shouldn't do that. Enforcing laws that prevent people from taking things without paying for them also carries expense, but so does enforcing any laws. Just because the war on drugs is dumb doesn't make paying to enforce other regulations poor economic policy.

[nickgeiger]

Agreed. We should enforce laws and we shouldn't make laws where the cost of enforcement outweighs the benefit to society of having those laws.

[earbitscom]

Sure, except that the price tag one person assigns to the art and culture we lose out on when people cannot stand to profit from it is different than another's.