A New Meaning for "Doggy Tag"

New Zealand, channeling Scotland, has a silly law which requires that all dogs must have microchips implanted in them. The justification for this silly law, which happens to be the justification for most silly laws, is public safety.

Veterinary Association chief executive Murray Gibb... said that microchipping was a blunt tool to address a big social problem with "poorly socialised and poorly managed" dogs – often owned by people with a similar profile – and there society needed to change its attitude to such owners.

In America, we have our share of silly laws and regulations, such as the hysteria around hot McDonald's coffee that resulted in putting warnings on coffee cup lids that the contents inside are hot. Or the warning printed in huge text on a beachball I keep on hand to kick around my yard that says, "WARNING: USE ONLY UNDER COMPETENT SUPERVISION." Or the movement to require helmets in the playing of soccer.

The libertarian argument against these silly rules is two-fold. First, there is a trade-off between safety and pleasure, and safety cannot trump 100% of the time or we will all be wearing helmets as we walk down the street. Second, statist policies like this undermine the individual freedoms which have brought us a standard of living that people a century ago could not even imagine. As Hayek lamented in 1944,

Progress came to be taken more and more for granted and was no longer recognized as the result of a policy of freedom...Because of the success already achieved, man became increasingly unwilling to tolerate the evils still with him which now appeared both unbearable and unnecessary.

In this spirit, the farm owners in New Zealand are rebelling against the microchip law:

Taranaki Federated Farmers president Bryan Hocken...said farmers might take their dogs to Parliament to protest. "Our dogs will piss on the steps to Parliament and we won't clean anything up," said Mr Hocken, of Tarata in North Taranaki. And if we end up in jail, then we'll take our dogs with us and they'll do their business on the floors there as well."