This morning’s Sunday Times report that a member of the Royal Family has been blackmailed is provoking and amusing in equal parts.  Provoking in that it illustrates (yet further) the fragility of one of the central institutions of the state.  Amusing in that it illustrates (yet further) that not even the monarchy, the font of all legal justice, is content with the law’s definition of ‘justice’.

However, it also provokes me because it illustrates as well a fundamental flaw in blackmail.  That is, if blackmail requires the exchange of money for the non-release of information, that information must be worth something to both parties.

Indeed, because it may instead by released to a third party, that third party must also value that information.  That is, there is a market for that information.  So let’s evaluate that market.

In this case, the blackmailer is said to have tried to extort £50,000 from a member of the Royal Family to prevent the release of the details.  This, it seems, was regarded as a reasonable price by the blackmailer, and an unreasonable price by the royalty.  The end result is that the blackmailer insisted that the price was too high, and went to the police.

Instead, consider the third party, which economists in this country call the ‘News of the World’.  They value the story for the opposite reason.  However, they also value it for vastly more than the blackmailed party does.  Nothing sells tabloid newspapers like a scandal involving the Royal family (unless it involves Keeley).

Let’s say that the appearance of a Royals story boosts the single-day circulation of a tabloid by 200,000 newspapers.  That is, at a retail price of 75p, the News of the World can expect to earn something like £150,000.  When one considers the boost to advertising, one can more than double that.

The News of the World can offer a price up to this and still make a profit off the back of it.  They can offer £300,000, and be better off as a result.  No surprise that they say that some stories can be worth “hundreds of thousands of pounds if not millions“.

Hold on.  That £300,000 that the News of the World could be offering is clearly more than the £50,000 that the blackmailers supposedly sought from the royal in question.  Since this is a market, the blackmailers have a choice between the two, and by resorting to blackmail, they clearly made the wrong choice for their own economic wellbeing.

In cases like this, when the affected party is an individual and the third party is a national newspaper, blackmail is simply a stupid thing to do.  Blackmail is separated from the distinct offence of extortion by the fact that the act threatened by an extortioner is illegal, whereas a blackmailer is threatening to do something entirely legal.  Thus, extortion should clearly be illegal.

But blackmail is simply the offer of a service to a consumer in the market before anyone else.  Put like that, there is nothing morally wrong with it whatsoever.  Indeed, because the criminalisation of blackmail denies the right of the accused of a right to defend him or herself according to the value that he or she places on the information, the current regime is destructive.

Having examined the true nature of blackmail, one can only conclude that it ought to be decriminalised entirely, before this prohibition does any more damage to both individuals and society.  It’s time to end this unwanted and unwarranted censorship.  It’s time to clear the black name of blackmail.

David Davies, the Conservative MP for Monmouth, has argued for an expansion of the prison system in a post on the blog of the deplorably authoritarian Cornerstone Group. So he claims, prison helps society [sic.] by keeping known criminals off the street, with massive economic ramifications. It’s a rare frosty day in hell when any but the most intransigent statist agrees with the Cornerstone Group, but today is just such a day.

The Cornerstone Group represents just about everything that’s wrong with the Conservative Party. They’re Kinder, Küche, Kirche sort of authoritarians, keen on protecting the privileges of the elite, be they the Church of England or the aristocracy, while oppressing the rights of the masses, be they women or ethnic and religious minorities.

However, in advocating prison, they’re not the ones doing the oppressing. They’re the ones defending the oppressed: the victims of crime. By the back-of-an-envelope calculations performed by the Cornerstone Group on the government’s crime statistics, Davies believes that, by doubling the number of prison places in order to house ‘career criminals’ the country can cut the cost of crime in half. That is, for an outlay of £3bn a year, the country can recoup between £30bn and £45bn.

Unquestionably, one of the great problems of recent times has been the deliberate blurring of the lines between the innocent and the guilty: those whose rights are infringed, and those that infringe upon others rights. We’ve seen the innocent punished through ASBOs, the Terrorism Act, detention without trial, ID cards, trial without jury, and so on. At the same time, victimless crimes, that involve no infringement of others’ rights and are thusly not a matter of state concern, such as drug consumption, are outlawed by the Taliban tendency represented by the Cornerstone Group.

The other side is the one with which David Davies agrees: that the guilty get off without serious punishment, or even punishment at all. Most thieves and burglars escape custodial sentences altogether, while even murderers are released after a few years. If this can be fixed by £3bn, to protect the rights of the people so let down by the current system, it’s worth every penny.

Alternatively, of course, one can free up spaces by decriminalising those current activities that are illegal, but not immoral. Take just one area in particular. 12,567 individuals are held at Her Majesty’s pleasure in England and Wales for ‘drug offences’ [sic.], none of which offend the basic liberties of other people. That’s more than are held for robbery and fraud put together, and comes to 16% of the total prison population. Free these innocents, and the state can keep more murderers, rapists, and robbers incarcerated.

The key is to begin to discriminate between what is moral and what is immoral, and decide whether a given action harms the natural rights - to life, liberty, and property - of other individuals. If it doesn’t, it is completely inexcusable for the state to criminalise such an action, which is the mechanism by which it force its own morality upon other people. At the same time, it is the duty of the state to protect its citizens’ natural rights by preventing criminal abuse. If this quest is harmed by insufficient prison places, then that must be resolved, lest the state lose its raison d’être altogether.