Well today we had a big office meeting in which our company instituted its new mandatory drug testing policy. I have nothing to worry about, I don’t even drink, but it still burns my ass on principle. They basically blackmail you into signing a piece of paper waiving all your rights as a citizen, that you will consent to any and all searches, and give all requested urine, hair, DNA, or whatever else samples at any time they want, or you lose your job because you MUST have something to hide. I have nothing to hide, but I don’t like being compelled to give up any liberties I may have left. I think this leads to interesting social problem, namely that there are varying spheres of influence in America today, employers CAN compel their employees to give up any and all civil rights and the federal government wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, not that it would. If we suppose a conspiracy between all employers in America, that conspiracy would basically overrule the supreme court. If every employer made drug testing mandatory, we wouldn’t even need laws against drugs, the free market would have done the supreme courts work, and while this may sound like a fair and pleasing idea to some, society as a whole might suffer. To the religious right this seems like the just banding together to assert their will and take back their world, while others, like the youth and artists will see it simply as economic persecution. I have always believed that the mind is not a sufficient tool to comprehend the universe, and similarly law cannot completely provide for a society, because society has been saved so many times by those people who exist on it’s fringes. The open source movement has a somewhat similar analogy, about a decade ago a popular Internet browser deeded some of its code to the open source community as a publicity stunt, the open source community played with it, and produced a vastly superior product to the original browser, called fire-fox, which is rapidly becoming the most popular browser on the Internet. The similarity here is that the open source community is “fringe”, but free (as in free speech) and so the free people on the fringe saved the browser. It is exactly in this same way that society itself needs an open source, free, fringe-element, and economic or legal persecution or legislation can only serves to drive the fringe farther away. We need a dramatic re-assertion of human and individual rights in this country, we need to again learn to separate the private sphere from the business and economic, contrary to popular belief, its not always about the economy, not everything has a dollar value, and the best things in life are free.