Driving back last night along the turnpike in Connecticut we found bill boards advocating the acquisition of an attorney as the first step in purchasing a house. As I drove a long I got to thinking “That’s silly, why stop at the house?” Why shouldn’t we all have an attorney at our side when engaging in most of life’s transactions. I thought: “I should get myself an attorney before this next toll booth!”

This lead to a conversation with my son about that that saying popular with gun advocates: “A well armed society is a polite society.”

We had heard a eye rolling piece on NPR just a few days before about how the taser advocate are hard at work to see to it that we all carry a tazer with us at all times. They mentioned the polite society meme. 30 years ago the handgun industry tried a similar scam much to their profit in urban America; wasn’t pretty.

I’ve been asking people if they think it would be a good idea to give everybody in their school, office, club a taser – polite is good right? My son’s opinion on this was that his school would rapidly descend into Hobbesian Anarchy.” “It hurts right? … You’d really want to go first then.”

I assume that everybody at Taser International carries a taser around the office, right? One wonders what would happen if you snuck into the office and zapped a few folks from behind and then snuck out.

So then we got to talking about how you might use pricing to temper the speed that society transitions into a state of anarchy. If you made it really expensive to reload then presumably only the rich could afford to slip into a state of anarchy. This only reminded us of how gangs of wealthy young victorian men would terrorize the country side in olde England. It’s a return to traditional values!

Presumably giving everybody their own lawyer would lead to a rapid decent into some hellish modality who’s name I’m not familiar with. Presumably the rich are already testing that out.