What does that even mean? Value is subjective -- that is one point on which all modern economists agree. As such, it is entirely meaningless to even compare the "magnitude" of values between different individuals, much less attempt to sum them up into some kind of collective utility function. Any system which would assign relative worth to different individuals' preferences is an application of subjective moral values. No "purely utilitarian activity" can exist outside of some subjective moral context.
If everyone were to agree that your regulations were an improvement then you could say that they objectively increase "societal wealth", ex ante, but in that case the regulations would be unnecessary. In all other cases, the decision that the benefits to those who desire the regulations somehow outweigh the costs imposed on the rest is necessarily a subjective one.
The same can be said of censorship. In some cases -- when "done right", of course -- censorship will increase "societal wealth" according to someone's metric. Just as with regulating markets, though, whether or not "societal wealth" has actually increased depends entirely on the observer's subjective moral values.
In a purely voluntary context it can be said that each participant's wealth, and thus total wealth, is expected to increase objectively, but that cannot be said in any other context, and the actions under discussion are decidedly involuntary.
I don't think anyone but governments can create a tax
The trick to creating a tax is convincing a critical mass of people that somehow, in your inexplicably special case, taking others' property without their permission isn't theft.
Governments appear to be most successful at this sort of slight-of-hand, but that doesn't mean they're the only ones capable of it.
Sarcasm, right? I hope so, because -- absent any evidence of deliberate fraud, which is illegal in its own right -- the former is also "imposing someone else's subjective moral values on the general populace."
Continuous save can be made workable with some reasonable rules for discarding unneeded versions. First, keep every version the user explicitly tags, as well as the baseline for the current session (to allow reversion). For the rest, devise a heuristic combining recency and amount of change to select old, trivial versions to be discarded. The further back you go into the history, the more widely spaced the checkpoints become. This is easier for structured documents, but with proper heuristics can also be applied to e.g. plain text. Temporal grouping (sessions, breaks in typing, etc.) can provide valuable clues in this area.
Currently most programs only have two levels of history: the saved version(s), and the transient undo buffer. There's no reason that this sharp cut-off couldn't be turned into a gradual transition.
From a legal point of view there should be no difference between TCP and UDP with regard to dropped packets. Individual TCP packets aren't guaranteed to be delivered, and get dropped all the time and for a variety of reasons. It's only at the application level that the protocol ensures aggregation and retransmission so as to reconstitute the original data stream without missing pieces or duplicates.
In the absence of an SLA, there really is no guarantee of any specific service on the part of an ISP toward its clients.
Isn't it fun when people make up their own draconian laws? I thought libertarians were supposed to be fundamentally opposed to that sort of thing...
As a rule they are. Regarding this particular blog, I didn't get the impression that the authors agreed with that aspect of the ruling. The first post is just dispassionately stating what the ruling was, and the second (describing their revised TOS) is clearly satire, intended to draw attention to the ridiculous consequences of treating TOS violations as a federal crime.
... but I suppose they are also supposed to be fundamentally opposed to slave ownership as well (below minimum wage doesn't count as slavery apparently).
No, it doesn't. Voluntary employment does not make one the property of one's employer, regardless of the rate of pay.
To avoid reliance on ambiguous terminology: libertarians consider the rightful claim of ownership by one person over another to be a logical impossibility -- a contradiction -- based on the nature of property and ownership. To libertarians, the term "slavery" includes only the specific claim of ownership over an entity with a will of its own, including, but not limited to, human beings. Don't expect libertarians to automatically oppose other, voluntary, actions just because you redefined the word "slavery" to mean something else.
I'm not going to get into whether it's a good idea to actually own a gun (for self-defense or other purposes, e.g. hunting), but a society where gun ownership is forbidden is, by definition, not a peaceful one, because someone must be (ironically) initiating force to prevent gun ownership. If guns are permitted you may have violence; if guns are forbidden, you do have violence.
Anyway, the incidents you bring up, while tragic, are blown all out of proportion. They make good headlines, but in reality any given person is rather more likely to die in a freak traffic accident than through any sort of random gun-related violence. If there's any common ground in the multitude of studies conducted on this issue, it's that violent crime and gun ownership don't correlate very strongly one way or the other.
If you truly believe that, then you should be a libertarian. Governments have far more power than anyone else. A company only power consists in choosing not to do business with you; governments, on the other hand, are comfortable with the use of force, possessing a facade of legitimacy no private aggressor can match.
As for the telcos -- this was never a free market to begin with. The government used its taxes and legislation to create the monopoly in the first place, and to this day the major communications companies remain only semi-private, with special privileges and regulations at various levels, all of which contribute to maintaining high barriers against any potential competition.
The situation with cable service, too, is primarily the product of local governments and their short-sighted regional exclusivity agreements.
From model of human action through which consistent libertarians evaluate such things, only voluntary interactions can result in an unqualified, objective improvement in individual and net social utility (by definition). The term "government" is just a label for all individuals and organizations whose actions involuntary affect others, of which nominal governments are the most obvious example. The free market / government split is really between voluntary and involuntary modes of interaction; the conclusion that government cannot be said to contribute to improvements in social utility is a natural result of the underlying model, and not any form of "cop-out".
Naturally, it all depends on what is defined as "success" and "failure". Libertarians would define success as the result reached via purely voluntary interaction, meaning there is no such thing as the failure of a free market. Obviously you are using some other criteria.
This statement is blatantly false, not "insightful". First, the responsibilities of governments are a political matter, not an economic one. Second, plenty of economists consider aggressive monopoly-busting to be a net loss rather than any sort of public good. Inform yourself.
Anyway, if the government really had a responsibility to "break up monopolies" it would have to start with itself, as government -- in all its forms -- is the biggest and most destructive monopoly in existence.
ok for christmas I get my brand new 15kw or later my 100kw laser gun.... but what can i do with that ?
To provide a sense of scale, industrial laser cutters (CO2) tend to run from 100 W to 3000 W. The smaller of these lasers is five times more powerful. I imagine it could cut through an aircraft's wing in milliseconds at most; due to weight limits they aren't very thick. Of course, you'd need to do more than just bore a hole through the wing to bring down a plane.
It's worth noting that a sufficiently powerful laser will actually vaporize the surface, rather than just melting it. It can essentially cause the surface to explode from the sudden influx of heat, resulting in far greater damage than a simple cut.
also laser is light, therefore someone just needs to diffract or reflect the stream to be protected ? is that right ?
At these power levels even an optics-quality mirror tends to absorb too much energy to remain effective. Even if it's just 0.1%, that's still 150 W to 1 kW being absorbed, which will quickly heat the mirror to the point where it becomes opaque.
If you could make it work, though, a retroreflector would be even better than a mirror, since it would redirect the laser back at the source.
What I don't get is this: The people visiting this site are already expressing their willingness to get into a vehicle with a perfect stranger claiming no special qualifications, and to let this stranger drive them to work (or wherever). What difference does it make how many other people this driver is transporting, or even what the state of repair of the vehicle is? If these risks are insufficient to prohibit small-scale carpooling, why should they present an obstacle to someone running a full-scale transportation service, given that they're being advertised the same way?
1) Once IPv6 kicks in at the ISP level proper, it's their responsibility from there on to provide connectivity between IPv4 and IPv6 space. IPv4 ip addresses are embedded in IPv6 btw, so addressing them is not a problem.
Actually, addressing is a problem unless you also have a public IPv4 address. Sure, IPv6 systems can send packets to IPv4 systems without any trouble -- all IPv4 addresses are also IPv6 addresses -- but where do those IPv4 systems send response packets? Connecting an IPv6-only client to an IPv4-only server would require at least some form of NAT to keep the connections straight.
If your PC has a public IPv4 address you can follow these simple instructions to configure an 6to4 anycast tunnel. That allows you to access IPv6 sites via the nearest 6to4-capable public router, whether or not your ISP supports IPv6 (provided they don't actively block 6to4 packets). Some scripting will be required if you want the tunnel to be persistent.
Note that the PC itself needs to have a public IPv4 address; this won't work if you're behind a NAT router. In my case I had already moved the PPPoE and NAT functions from the DSL router to my workstation, so setting up 6to4 was relatively easy. (The router didn't have enough RAM to track every connection, causing it to stall periodically.)
For those using a font where this isn't so obvious: serutan wrote "H two zero" (H20), not "H two O" (H2O). The former is a molecule with 20 hydrogen atoms; the latter is two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom, commonly known as "water".
Hydrogen only has one bonding site per atom, so getting more than two of them to bond together without some other element in between would be quite a feat.
Serutan's Fun Factz #57661: The chemical formula for water is H20.
How'd you manage to cram 20 hydrogen atoms into a single molecule? I'd bet there are some professional chemists who'd be quite interested in recreating such a feat...
I've been using Debian Sid as my home operating system for years. I'm well aware that they offer source packages; I've used them myself. Naturally, if you want to install a source package you need to compile it on your own computer. However, this is true of any distribution, regardless of its style of package management. The statement I was responding to was "the CPU will never, ever go idle, it will always be compiling!", which applies (with a bit of hyperbole) to source-based distributions like Gentoo, but not to primarily binary ones like Debian, the presence of source packages notwithstanding.
Does anyone else see the resemblence between DNA and crufted up old legacy software?
Well, imagine that this software started out as a simple "hello-world" program, and that every time the requirements changed -- a frequent occurence -- it was updated by repeatedly making the smallest change required to bring it a bit more in line with the requirements, with no regard at all to readability or maintenance. Further assume that random changes are being made all the time, and are only removed when a customer registers a complaint.
The result would probably look something like DNA.
Don't worry about the misinterpretation. In retrospect it's easy to see how you could draw that conclusion, just as it was the other two times it happened to me today.:-)
The fact that BSD and OS X can incorporate ZFS though, does imply a certain amount of "legal compatibility" on the part of CDDL though.
True. However, Linux is one of the most obvious targets for any code transplants from Solaris, and the one that presents the greatest threat to Sun. My main point is that Linux's use of the GPL isn't the problem; indications are that Sun didn't want Solaris features to end up in Linux, and chose their license accordingly.
... since they've based their license on MPL, I assume all the work of the Mozilla community should be similarly viewed?
Your example supports my argument. You'll note that the Mozilla code is all tri-licensed, MPL/GPL/LGPL, in the interests of maximizing compatibility with other open-source projects.
This seems to be a day for misinterpretation. I did not mean to imply that the CDDL is not open source; I was simply setting the term off from the rest of the sentence, e.g. "someone says, 'ZFS is open source'" or, equivalently, "someone says that this project is 'open source.'" In other words, what quote marks used to mean before they were co-opted to indicate sarcasm.
Regardless of Sun's intentions, the effect is that they get the good PR associated with releasing code under an open-source license while keeping their most popular open-source competitor, Linux, from simply porting over the interesting bits. Most open-source project aim for technical and legal compatibility; thus the GPL and similar standard licenses. That Sun apparently does not share these goals bodes ill for those inclined to treat them as just another open-source contributor.
Punishing someone after the fact doesn't erase the harm their crime may have caused. This isn't a problem of holding people accountable for their negative actions, it's for preventing those actions in the first place.
All perfectly true, but you are discounting the harm caused by the prevention itself. In place of the possibility -- I'll even grant you the probability -- of future harm caused by the actions of others you would substitute the certainty of present harm caused by your own actions. The relative risk of two different kinds of harm is a subjective matter. If this subjective valuation can be used to justify the use of force against a non-aggressor then any other subjective valuation can as well. The law must be impartial and objective to be meaningful; the only alternative under a universal ethic is everyone legally employing force against anyone else whenever they feel like it.
I find it moral to allow proportionately different punishments for actions that offer statistical likelihood of harm. Those are personal values.
They cease to be mere "personal values" when you use them to justify the use of force against others. I, for one, will not accept anything less than a rational and objective argument logically distinguishing your actions from those of the (potential) criminals you seek to punish. If you cannot make such a distinction then your actions are criminal, regardless of their intended effect. Forget subjective morality; as you say, neither of us is likely to convince the other to switch sides. Just answer this: why shouldn't I consider you just another common criminal? How are your actions any different from theirs?
You claim that some individuals under the influence of certain drugs are statistically likely to commit unspecified crimes; for the sake of argument I will assume that this is true, and that the likelihood is 100%. To prevent the possibility of such crimes you propose to prohibit the manufacture, sale, possession, and/or use of such drugs. To effect such a prohibition would require the use of force sufficient to overcome any resistance, including loss of property, incarceration, physical injury, and potentially death. If you fine someone to prevent a potential theft, or injure someone to prevent a potential assault, or kill someone to prevent a potential murder, then your actions are objectively worse than those you seek to prevent.
It is instructive to look at the requirements for the justified use of force in self-defense, which include (a) the presence of an immediate threat; (b) no lesser use of force available to effectively mitigate that threat; and (c) the risk of irreparable harm. In some cases you have (c), e.g. murder would be irreparable, but you do not have (a) or (b). The threat is not immediate, but rather a remote future possibility, and there are other ways to mitigate the threat which do not involve the use of force at all: personal persuasion, social pressure, individual preventative defensive measures, etc. The use of preemptive force in this case is not justified.
All this assumes that there is a one-to-one correlation between drug use and crime, and that your measures are effective in stopping the use of drugs, as opposed to merely driving it into hiding. Neither assumption is particularly likely.
I still don't see any point in banning the drug itself, however. The actions you're worried about are already crimes, and the perpetrators won't get away simply because their actions can be attributed to the drugs. They took the drugs of their own free will, and thus are directly responsible for the consequences.
We're not ignoring the effect of drugs on a person's choices; we're saying that it's irrelevant. The requirements for free will are satisfied by the fact that the individual has the choice of whether to take the drug in the first place, knowing the likely consequences.
Your argument only supports a ban on forcing someone to take drugs involuntarily, which is already a crime in its own right.
Slashdot Mirror
maximizing the benefit for the society as a whole
What does that even mean? Value is subjective -- that is one point on which all modern economists agree. As such, it is entirely meaningless to even compare the "magnitude" of values between different individuals, much less attempt to sum them up into some kind of collective utility function. Any system which would assign relative worth to different individuals' preferences is an application of subjective moral values. No "purely utilitarian activity" can exist outside of some subjective moral context.
If everyone were to agree that your regulations were an improvement then you could say that they objectively increase "societal wealth", ex ante, but in that case the regulations would be unnecessary. In all other cases, the decision that the benefits to those who desire the regulations somehow outweigh the costs imposed on the rest is necessarily a subjective one.
The same can be said of censorship. In some cases -- when "done right", of course -- censorship will increase "societal wealth" according to someone's metric. Just as with regulating markets, though, whether or not "societal wealth" has actually increased depends entirely on the observer's subjective moral values.
In a purely voluntary context it can be said that each participant's wealth, and thus total wealth, is expected to increase objectively, but that cannot be said in any other context, and the actions under discussion are decidedly involuntary.
I don't think anyone but governments can create a tax
The trick to creating a tax is convincing a critical mass of people that somehow, in your inexplicably special case, taking others' property without their permission isn't theft.
Governments appear to be most successful at this sort of slight-of-hand, but that doesn't mean they're the only ones capable of it.
Sarcasm, right? I hope so, because -- absent any evidence of deliberate fraud, which is illegal in its own right -- the former is also "imposing someone else's subjective moral values on the general populace."
Continuous save can be made workable with some reasonable rules for discarding unneeded versions. First, keep every version the user explicitly tags, as well as the baseline for the current session (to allow reversion). For the rest, devise a heuristic combining recency and amount of change to select old, trivial versions to be discarded. The further back you go into the history, the more widely spaced the checkpoints become. This is easier for structured documents, but with proper heuristics can also be applied to e.g. plain text. Temporal grouping (sessions, breaks in typing, etc.) can provide valuable clues in this area.
Currently most programs only have two levels of history: the saved version(s), and the transient undo buffer. There's no reason that this sharp cut-off couldn't be turned into a gradual transition.
From a legal point of view there should be no difference between TCP and UDP with regard to dropped packets. Individual TCP packets aren't guaranteed to be delivered, and get dropped all the time and for a variety of reasons. It's only at the application level that the protocol ensures aggregation and retransmission so as to reconstitute the original data stream without missing pieces or duplicates.
In the absence of an SLA, there really is no guarantee of any specific service on the part of an ISP toward its clients.
Isn't it fun when people make up their own draconian laws? I thought libertarians were supposed to be fundamentally opposed to that sort of thing ...
As a rule they are. Regarding this particular blog, I didn't get the impression that the authors agreed with that aspect of the ruling. The first post is just dispassionately stating what the ruling was, and the second (describing their revised TOS) is clearly satire, intended to draw attention to the ridiculous consequences of treating TOS violations as a federal crime.
... but I suppose they are also supposed to be fundamentally opposed to slave ownership as well (below minimum wage doesn't count as slavery apparently).
No, it doesn't. Voluntary employment does not make one the property of one's employer, regardless of the rate of pay.
To avoid reliance on ambiguous terminology: libertarians consider the rightful claim of ownership by one person over another to be a logical impossibility -- a contradiction -- based on the nature of property and ownership. To libertarians, the term "slavery" includes only the specific claim of ownership over an entity with a will of its own, including, but not limited to, human beings. Don't expect libertarians to automatically oppose other, voluntary, actions just because you redefined the word "slavery" to mean something else.
I'm not going to get into whether it's a good idea to actually own a gun (for self-defense or other purposes, e.g. hunting), but a society where gun ownership is forbidden is, by definition, not a peaceful one, because someone must be (ironically) initiating force to prevent gun ownership. If guns are permitted you may have violence; if guns are forbidden, you do have violence.
Anyway, the incidents you bring up, while tragic, are blown all out of proportion. They make good headlines, but in reality any given person is rather more likely to die in a freak traffic accident than through any sort of random gun-related violence. If there's any common ground in the multitude of studies conducted on this issue, it's that violent crime and gun ownership don't correlate very strongly one way or the other.
If you truly believe that, then you should be a libertarian. Governments have far more power than anyone else. A company only power consists in choosing not to do business with you; governments, on the other hand, are comfortable with the use of force, possessing a facade of legitimacy no private aggressor can match.
As for the telcos -- this was never a free market to begin with. The government used its taxes and legislation to create the monopoly in the first place, and to this day the major communications companies remain only semi-private, with special privileges and regulations at various levels, all of which contribute to maintaining high barriers against any potential competition.
The situation with cable service, too, is primarily the product of local governments and their short-sighted regional exclusivity agreements.
From model of human action through which consistent libertarians evaluate such things, only voluntary interactions can result in an unqualified, objective improvement in individual and net social utility (by definition). The term "government" is just a label for all individuals and organizations whose actions involuntary affect others, of which nominal governments are the most obvious example. The free market / government split is really between voluntary and involuntary modes of interaction; the conclusion that government cannot be said to contribute to improvements in social utility is a natural result of the underlying model, and not any form of "cop-out".
Naturally, it all depends on what is defined as "success" and "failure". Libertarians would define success as the result reached via purely voluntary interaction, meaning there is no such thing as the failure of a free market. Obviously you are using some other criteria.
This statement is blatantly false, not "insightful". First, the responsibilities of governments are a political matter, not an economic one. Second, plenty of economists consider aggressive monopoly-busting to be a net loss rather than any sort of public good. Inform yourself.
Anyway, if the government really had a responsibility to "break up monopolies" it would have to start with itself, as government -- in all its forms -- is the biggest and most destructive monopoly in existence.
ok for christmas I get my brand new 15kw or later my 100kw laser gun. ... but what can i do with that ?
To provide a sense of scale, industrial laser cutters (CO2) tend to run from 100 W to 3000 W. The smaller of these lasers is five times more powerful. I imagine it could cut through an aircraft's wing in milliseconds at most; due to weight limits they aren't very thick. Of course, you'd need to do more than just bore a hole through the wing to bring down a plane.
It's worth noting that a sufficiently powerful laser will actually vaporize the surface, rather than just melting it. It can essentially cause the surface to explode from the sudden influx of heat, resulting in far greater damage than a simple cut.
also laser is light, therefore someone just needs to diffract or reflect the stream to be protected ? is that right ?
At these power levels even an optics-quality mirror tends to absorb too much energy to remain effective. Even if it's just 0.1%, that's still 150 W to 1 kW being absorbed, which will quickly heat the mirror to the point where it becomes opaque.
If you could make it work, though, a retroreflector would be even better than a mirror, since it would redirect the laser back at the source.
What I don't get is this: The people visiting this site are already expressing their willingness to get into a vehicle with a perfect stranger claiming no special qualifications, and to let this stranger drive them to work (or wherever). What difference does it make how many other people this driver is transporting, or even what the state of repair of the vehicle is? If these risks are insufficient to prohibit small-scale carpooling, why should they present an obstacle to someone running a full-scale transportation service, given that they're being advertised the same way?
1) Once IPv6 kicks in at the ISP level proper, it's their responsibility from there on to provide connectivity between IPv4 and IPv6 space. IPv4 ip addresses are embedded in IPv6 btw, so addressing them is not a problem.
Actually, addressing is a problem unless you also have a public IPv4 address. Sure, IPv6 systems can send packets to IPv4 systems without any trouble -- all IPv4 addresses are also IPv6 addresses -- but where do those IPv4 systems send response packets? Connecting an IPv6-only client to an IPv4-only server would require at least some form of NAT to keep the connections straight.
If your PC has a public IPv4 address you can follow these simple instructions to configure an 6to4 anycast tunnel. That allows you to access IPv6 sites via the nearest 6to4-capable public router, whether or not your ISP supports IPv6 (provided they don't actively block 6to4 packets). Some scripting will be required if you want the tunnel to be persistent.
Note that the PC itself needs to have a public IPv4 address; this won't work if you're behind a NAT router. In my case I had already moved the PPPoE and NAT functions from the DSL router to my workstation, so setting up 6to4 was relatively easy. (The router didn't have enough RAM to track every connection, causing it to stall periodically.)
For those using a font where this isn't so obvious: serutan wrote "H two zero" (H20), not "H two O" (H2O). The former is a molecule with 20 hydrogen atoms; the latter is two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom, commonly known as "water".
Hydrogen only has one bonding site per atom, so getting more than two of them to bond together without some other element in between would be quite a feat.
Serutan's Fun Factz #57661: The chemical formula for water is H20.
How'd you manage to cram 20 hydrogen atoms into a single molecule? I'd bet there are some professional chemists who'd be quite interested in recreating such a feat...
That was my first thought as well. Glad to see I wasn't the only one.
I've been using Debian Sid as my home operating system for years. I'm well aware that they offer source packages; I've used them myself. Naturally, if you want to install a source package you need to compile it on your own computer. However, this is true of any distribution, regardless of its style of package management. The statement I was responding to was "the CPU will never, ever go idle, it will always be compiling!", which applies (with a bit of hyperbole) to source-based distributions like Gentoo, but not to primarily binary ones like Debian, the presence of source packages notwithstanding.
Debian is a binary distribution, thus no end-user compilation is necessary. You're thinking of Gentoo.
Does anyone else see the resemblence between DNA and crufted up old legacy software?
Well, imagine that this software started out as a simple "hello-world" program, and that every time the requirements changed -- a frequent occurence -- it was updated by repeatedly making the smallest change required to bring it a bit more in line with the requirements, with no regard at all to readability or maintenance. Further assume that random changes are being made all the time, and are only removed when a customer registers a complaint.
The result would probably look something like DNA.
Don't worry about the misinterpretation. In retrospect it's easy to see how you could draw that conclusion, just as it was the other two times it happened to me today. :-)
The fact that BSD and OS X can incorporate ZFS though, does imply a certain amount of "legal compatibility" on the part of CDDL though.
True. However, Linux is one of the most obvious targets for any code transplants from Solaris, and the one that presents the greatest threat to Sun. My main point is that Linux's use of the GPL isn't the problem; indications are that Sun didn't want Solaris features to end up in Linux, and chose their license accordingly.
... since they've based their license on MPL, I assume all the work of the Mozilla community should be similarly viewed?
Your example supports my argument. You'll note that the Mozilla code is all tri-licensed, MPL/GPL/LGPL, in the interests of maximizing compatibility with other open-source projects.
This seems to be a day for misinterpretation. I did not mean to imply that the CDDL is not open source; I was simply setting the term off from the rest of the sentence, e.g. "someone says, 'ZFS is open source'" or, equivalently, "someone says that this project is 'open source.'" In other words, what quote marks used to mean before they were co-opted to indicate sarcasm.
Regardless of Sun's intentions, the effect is that they get the good PR associated with releasing code under an open-source license while keeping their most popular open-source competitor, Linux, from simply porting over the interesting bits. Most open-source project aim for technical and legal compatibility; thus the GPL and similar standard licenses. That Sun apparently does not share these goals bodes ill for those inclined to treat them as just another open-source contributor.
Punishing someone after the fact doesn't erase the harm their crime may have caused. This isn't a problem of holding people accountable for their negative actions, it's for preventing those actions in the first place.
All perfectly true, but you are discounting the harm caused by the prevention itself. In place of the possibility -- I'll even grant you the probability -- of future harm caused by the actions of others you would substitute the certainty of present harm caused by your own actions. The relative risk of two different kinds of harm is a subjective matter. If this subjective valuation can be used to justify the use of force against a non-aggressor then any other subjective valuation can as well. The law must be impartial and objective to be meaningful; the only alternative under a universal ethic is everyone legally employing force against anyone else whenever they feel like it.
I find it moral to allow proportionately different punishments for actions that offer statistical likelihood of harm. Those are personal values.
They cease to be mere "personal values" when you use them to justify the use of force against others. I, for one, will not accept anything less than a rational and objective argument logically distinguishing your actions from those of the (potential) criminals you seek to punish. If you cannot make such a distinction then your actions are criminal, regardless of their intended effect. Forget subjective morality; as you say, neither of us is likely to convince the other to switch sides. Just answer this: why shouldn't I consider you just another common criminal? How are your actions any different from theirs?
You claim that some individuals under the influence of certain drugs are statistically likely to commit unspecified crimes; for the sake of argument I will assume that this is true, and that the likelihood is 100%. To prevent the possibility of such crimes you propose to prohibit the manufacture, sale, possession, and/or use of such drugs. To effect such a prohibition would require the use of force sufficient to overcome any resistance, including loss of property, incarceration, physical injury, and potentially death. If you fine someone to prevent a potential theft, or injure someone to prevent a potential assault, or kill someone to prevent a potential murder, then your actions are objectively worse than those you seek to prevent.
It is instructive to look at the requirements for the justified use of force in self-defense, which include (a) the presence of an immediate threat; (b) no lesser use of force available to effectively mitigate that threat; and (c) the risk of irreparable harm. In some cases you have (c), e.g. murder would be irreparable, but you do not have (a) or (b). The threat is not immediate, but rather a remote future possibility, and there are other ways to mitigate the threat which do not involve the use of force at all: personal persuasion, social pressure, individual preventative defensive measures, etc. The use of preemptive force in this case is not justified.
All this assumes that there is a one-to-one correlation between drug use and crime, and that your measures are effective in stopping the use of drugs, as opposed to merely driving it into hiding. Neither assumption is particularly likely.
I still don't see any point in banning the drug itself, however. The actions you're worried about are already crimes, and the perpetrators won't get away simply because their actions can be attributed to the drugs. They took the drugs of their own free will, and thus are directly responsible for the consequences.
We're not ignoring the effect of drugs on a person's choices; we're saying that it's irrelevant. The requirements for free will are satisfied by the fact that the individual has the choice of whether to take the drug in the first place, knowing the likely consequences.
Your argument only supports a ban on forcing someone to take drugs involuntarily, which is already a crime in its own right.