Blackmail as a Victimless Crime: Reply to Altman (1998)

There&#x27;s a very simple explanation:<p>Rules are created to optimize outcomes, not to be logically consistent.<p>That&#x27;s it. People who think everything flows from a small set of elegant axioms are wrong. Such systems never survive contact with reality, because reality is messy and not mathematically elegant. Rules are also created by multiple parties, in multiple circumstances, and with various compromises, tradeoffs, subjectivity and intentional and accidental omissions built in, which require later inelegant patches.<p>The reason why blackmail is illegal though the components of it are fine is because we&#x27;ve seen that it leads to very suboptimal outcomes. It allows one to wield far more power than one would legitimately wield. If you reveal something embarrassing or illegal about your boss, your boss may be replaced with someone else. If you try to make an agreement with your boss without blackmail material you usually get a &quot;fair&quot; negotiation and outcome. The combination of both allows you to wield power you never could otherwise.<p>And in general a situation where people who do stuff like installing spyware or digging through somebody else&#x27;s garbage manage to usurp authority isn&#x27;t a good one.

Sounds like that Simpsons episode (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simpsons.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Bob_Next_Door" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simpsons.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Bob_Next_Door</a>):<p><i>Bob arrives at The Five Corners and has himself and Bart (with his hands and feet bound with duct tape) stand in two of the states at the meeting point. He then tells Bart of his plan to murder him: Bob will stand in one state; reach into a second state and shoot his gun; have the bullet travel through a third state; hit Bart in a fourth state; and Bart will fall dead in the fifth state (although this is not possible, as the bullet would have to curve around to actually hit Bart). Because all portions of the process is legal, he will have immunity from prosecution in all five states so Bob can’t be charged for Bart&#x27;s murder.</i>

Is this what passes for &quot;insight&quot; in economics nowadays?<p>Can&#x27;t wait to hear this author use the same logic elsewhere.<p>&quot;It&#x27;s legal to wish for someone&#x27;s death, and legal to hand over briefcases full of cash. In this paper I will demonstrate how hiring a hitman is, in fact, ...&quot;<p>or<p>&quot;It&#x27;s well-known that hydrogen is an explosive gas, and oxygen is an explosive gas, Q.E.D., the author maintains that the chemical H2O should in fact, also be considered an explosive gas.&quot;

Writing nonsense is not a crime.<p>Being a paid academic is not a crime.<p>Writing nonsense as a paid academic should be a crime.

Doesn&#x27;t the same thing apply to bribery? I can gift you something, and I can ask you to do something. But if I do the first conditioned on the second it&#x27;s bribery.

This just seems fallacious. It&#x27;s not illegal to pick up an item in the store, and it&#x27;s not illegal to walk out of a store, therefore shoplifting is a victimless crime and should be allowed?<p>It reminds me of &quot;Affirmative conclusion from a negative premise&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rationalwiki.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Affirmative_conclusion_from_a_negative_premise" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rationalwiki.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Affirmative_conclusion_from_a_...</a>) or an inverse &quot;two wrongs don&#x27;t make a right&quot; (two rights do not make a wrong?)

&gt; <i>Blackmail consists of two things, each indisputably legal on their own; yet, when combined in a single act, the result is considered a crime.</i><p>A stabbing consists of someone&#x27;s torso and someone&#x27;s knife occupying the same space at the same time. Each is fine on its own, though!

Abstract<p>The legal theory of blackmail is the veritable puzzle surrounded by a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Consider. Blackmail consists of two things, each indisputably legal on their own; yet, when combined in a single act, the result is considered a crime. What are the two things? First, there is either a threat or an offer. In the former case, it is, typically, to publicize an embarrassing secret; in the latter, it is to remain silent about this information. Second, there is a demand or a request for funds or other valuable considerations. When put together, there is a threat that unless paid off, the secret will be told.<p>Either of these things, standing alone, is perfectly legal. To tell an embarrassing secret is to do no more than gossip; no one has ever been incarcerated for that. To ask for money is likewise a legitimate activity, as everyone from Bill Clinton to the beggar to the fund raiser for the local charity can attest. Yet when combined, the result is called blackmail and it is widely seen as a crime.<p>But that is just the puzzle. The mystery is that over a dozen attempts to account for this puzzle have been written, and not a one of them agrees to any great extent with any other. It is as if there are a plethora of witnesses to a motor vehicle accident, each not only disagreeing with all the others, but each telling a completely different story. The enigma is that with the exception of a corporal&#x27;s guard of commentators, no one has seen fit to assert the contrary: that two legal &quot;whites&quot; cannot make an illegal &quot;black.&quot;<p>This is precisely the point of the present paper. The authors maintain that since it is legal to gossip, it should therefore not be against the law to threaten to gossip, unless paid off not to do so. In a word, blackmail is a victimless crime, and must be legalized, if justice is to be attained. The authors also reply to a paper written by Scott Altman, who takes a different position.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;Delivery.cfm&#x2F;98032702.pdf?abstractid=83348&amp;mirid=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;Delivery.cfm&#x2F;98032702.pdf?abstr...</a>

Should add 1998 to the title.

Blackmail is a stupid crime, because you could basically always do it in a way that doesn’t fit the definition of the crime. The threat never has to be directly made, and the offer never has to be directly associated with it. Only the clumsiest blackmail practitioner would ever find themselves creating evidence of a blackmail crime.

Literally none of this matters by the way. Within the next 10 years, any form of blackmail is going to be falsifiable due to generative AI. Anyone who has been blackmailed will have plausible deniability if their blackmailer decides to release the blackmail material itself.

Having read through it I was disappointed in their decision to barely to engage with the potential solution to the paradox that would result from the development of a legal construct of “criminal coercion”, they touch on coercion a few times but don’t dig in as they’re not focused on suggesting such a thing (it’s certainly not their job to as the authors they are free to decide the remit of their paper after all)<p>… but I feel the concept of “criminal coercion” is a powerful potential fix to a lot of modern problems. If one party has sufficient power via any means that they can coerce and control their other party, at some point (the hard part is deciding where this point is) the coercive nature switches from being “normal life in a capitalist society under the rule of law” (a phrase I’m using to try and cover all the forms of coercion that we kind of have to live with, eg cops and the law) to being “criminal coercion”.<p>There’s obviously a massive argument as to what the cut off should be, but the concept is simple and feels morally justified which is a good start. It’s not perfect but it’s a good start at least, unlike the “let’s just make blackmail legal because… etc..” attitude that keeps coming up in the paper.

I find the argument quite ridiculous, but worse, the premise seems flawed. Contrary to the authors claim, publishing humiliating information would probably fall under defamation, which is illegal. At least in my country.

Drinking is legal, driving is legal, so it should be legal to combine them. trabant00, professor emeritus of mental gymnastics. Plz give money for study and paper.<p>There&#x27;s plenty of things that are legal except if done in a certain way, at a certain time, with certain persons, circumstances, etc. In fact I would argue most things are legal in a limited scope than things that are legal in any circumstance.<p>And in the case of blackmail there&#x27;s not just the two, unless you ignore the mother freaking THREAT. You are threatening somebody, that alone makes them a victim.

Deliberately setting up an environment to blackmail people in is definitely not a victimless crime.

Having read through it I was disappointed in their decision to barely to engage with the potential solution to the paradox that would result from the development of a legal construct of “criminal coercion”, they touch on coercion a few times but don’t dig in as they’re not focused on suggesting such a thing (it’s certainly not their job to as the authors they are free to decide the remit of their paper after all)<p>… but I feel the concept of “criminal coercion” is a powerful potential fix to a lot of modern problems. If one party has sufficient power via any means that they can coerce and control their other party, at some point (the hard part is deciding where this point is) the coercive nature switches from being “normal life in a capitalist society under the rule of law” (a phrase I’m using to try and cover all the forms of coercion that we kind of have to live with, eg cops and the law) to being “criminal coercion”.<p>There’s obviously a massive argument as to what the cut off should be, but the concept is simple and feels morally justified which is a good start.

Can two rights make a wrong?

I&#x27;ll bite. Was canceling celebrities throughout the 2010s victimless?

Blackmail is often restricted to publishing information regarding an illegel activity, not just an embarrassing one, in which case the public is the victim of both the potential coverup and the discriminatory enforcement of the law.

What a pathetic straw man of a paper.<p>It’s transparently obvious that blackmail is not a victimless crime given it’s not hard to identify who the victim is in a case of blackmail. Secondly their argument (blackmail comprises two parts each of which is legal on its own and therefore should be legal when done together) is both untrue on its face and fails given there are lots of things which are legal in isolation that are illegal together (eg it’s legal to buy alcohol, it’s legal to be 16, it’s not legal to be 16 and buy alcohol. It’s legal to drink, it’s legal to ride a motorcycle, it’s not legal to ride a motorcycle when you have been drinking etc).<p>It’s untrue on its face given that the threat part of blackmail may well be illegal on its own and the reveal of the information may be illegal depending on what the information is and how it was obtained..

This paper seems to have too much &#x27;whataboutism&#x27;. Sam says that we shouldn&#x27;t exploit poisoned people by charging lots of money for an antitode, and the paper literally responds by calling him in favour of a &#x27;fascist model&#x27; of society rather than being for free-enterprise.<p>Talk about being a straw man!

insider trading, a victimless crime

Insider trading, a victimless crime