Kudos to both the Washington Times and North Dakota state GOP Rep. Jim Kaspar for opposing the Republican Congress’s wrongheaded attempt to ban Internet gambling. There are at least a few folks on the right who still understand that there’s more to “limited government” than revoking the estate tax.

Sen. Frist is justifying his misguided, pre-election move on the grounds that it’s the government’s responsibility to protect us from bad behavior. Said Frist on the floor of the Senate, “Internet gambling threatens our families by bringing addictive behavior right into our living rooms.”

At risk of delving into libertarian cliches, even if you buy the dubious notion that protecting us from “addictive behavior” is a legitimate function of government, even the most well-intentioned of paternalistic legislation is, ultimately, enforced at the point of a gun. The people who break these laws are arrested. The people who resist arrest risk getting shot. The end of result of legislation like Frist’s is, absurdly, that government will eventually use violence against American citizens to “protect” them from violating Sen. Bill Frist’s morals.

Here’s a real-world example: At last week’s forum for my Overkill paper, I met Salvatore and Anita Culosi, parents of Sal Culosi, the Fairfax, Virginia optometrist shot and killed by a SWAT team earlier this year. The SWAT team came to Culosi’s home to enforce Virginia’s prohibition on gambling, ostensibly designed to “protect” Virginians like Sal Culosi from wagering their own money on games of chance. Culosi, an accomplished, single man who had the means to back up his wagers, had been placing bets on football games with friends. He’s dead because there are people in Virginia’s government who fail to see the absurdity of sending a military unit to arrest a man guilty of nothing more than spending his own money in ways some people find unseemly. That’s it.

Culosi’s family is still understandably devastated. Mrs. Culosi still can’t talk about her son without fighting back tears. I choked up several times just listening to her. I can’t imagine the rage that would come with losing an adult son to such a stupid and hypocritical policy. Horrible.

The Culosi outrage has been compounded by the insensitive and unaccountable behavior of many in Fairfax County government since the incident (are you reading, Justice Scalia?). It’s been seven months now, and the Fairfax County police department still refuses to cooperate with Culosi’s family.

Frist’s legislation is aimed primarily at financial institutions. But like all prohibitions on consensual crimes, it will fail. And so over the next several years we will inevitably see attempts by Congress to expand and strengthen the gambling prohibition, to the point where, as is now the law in Washington state, the prohibition will be aimed squarely at gamblers themselves, not just the companies that profit from gambling.

Perhaps Senators Frist and Kyl, and Reps. Leach and Goodlatte should sit down for a few minutes with Salvatore and Anita Culosi. It would at least help them understand the inevitable consequences of using the blunt instrument of government to impose their own values and morals on the rest of the country.