To what extent should governments regulate what people can and can't do in public? Or how much freedom should people have to do as they please? To be clear, I'm not talking about fundamental human rights or constitutionally protected freedoms like freedom of speech, belief and assembly. I'm talking small simple things. Being able to drink a beer in public. Painting your house orange. Wearing saggy pants with your boxers sticking out the top. Break-dancing on a street corner. Skateboarding in a park. Doing a street performance, even if you absolutely suck at singing. Running a food truck or hot dog stand. Sleeping on a bench.

My view is that people should be able to do whatever they want, even if it is unpopular, unless there is a compelling reason for the government to stop them from doing it in the interests of public safety, health, hygiene, or (to a more careful extent) comfort. For example, I think you should be able to drink beer while walking down the street as long as you're not being drunk and disorderly, or skateboard in the park as long as you're not threatening the safety of others.

Others who I have discussed this with disagree. They think that the government should regulate public behaviour and environment according to the preferences of the majority. If a majority of voters dislike an activity and don't want to have to look at it, then they can ask the government to step in. Therefore, if the residents of a town find colourful houses an eyesore, they can and should pass an ordinance against painting your house orange. There is no fundamental human right to have an orange house, and nor does a rule against orange houses discriminate against protected classes of people, so the government should be able to enforce the electorate's preferences on such a matter.

What do you think?

I tend to agree with you, Kea. I'd like to hear a stronger case for busybody laws than 'no fundamental right to THAT'.

I think the issue here is some of these rest on subtleties that people who like to make black and white judgement calls don't consider. For example, skateboarding seems innocent and can actually be a good passtime for young people. The problem is it can cause not immediately visible physical damage to property when they grind on edges or jump on cetain surfaces. I guess it boild down to making a serious effort to determine whether something is just an annoyance or if it crosses the line to being a legitmate inconveniance/harm. I can always ignore the idoit with his pants hanging off his ass, but I can't stop breathing if someone sitting near me starts smoking.

As long as it costs me no money or causes no harm, what's the problem?

I guess my bar for a legitimate annoyance is fairly high. Others feel that the crowds that form around food trucks are an obstruction to passers by and especially wheelchair users, so food trucks should be prohibited. And I'm like, really? Why don't you try saying "excuse me"? They'll annoy you for all of 10 seconds. Get over it.

I guess it comes down to different philosophies about the purpose of public space. Is it a space that nobody owns where people should be able to do as they wish barring harm to others, or is it a shared community space that should be governed according to the standards of the community, whatever those may be? For example, regulations on architectural style to maintain the aesthetic of a neighbourhood.

The "costs no money" bit is a little tricky. If you allow hotdog stands, then food safety inspectors cost money. If you allow open carry of alcoholic beverages, then you might have to spend a bit more on cleaning up discarded beer cans. If you allow street musicians, then it costs money to enforce noise violations. Some places just find it easier and cheaper to have blanket bans on anything that might require bureaucrats to do more work.

Some of these can be tricky. I'm going to focus on drinking in public as an example. If drinking in public is allowed but drunk and disorderly is not then the act of being drunk and disorderly needs to be policed. This can be tricky and costly. It is much easier and cheaper to regulate drinking to private or licensed venues. This also places the duty of monitoring drunk and disorderly on the venues who profit from the alcohol sales which means less taxes for the average Joe.

Well, I feel that this takes away a lot of freedom for only a partial solution to the problem. It's still possible and common for people to get drunk indoors and then go outdoors to cause trouble. Crowds of people leaving bars and house parties are often rowdy, so drunk and disorderly behaviour needs to be policed anyway. My feeling is that it's worth spending a bit more money to have more freedom. But if 51% of the electorate feels otherwise (or even 51% of the electorate that bothers to show up to local council meetings), I guess I'm out of luck.

On a separate note, how about people who are generally harmless but whose appearance offends public standards of decency? Like this weirdo who bikes around Key West, Florida in nothing but a G-string and a stovepipe hat. Should they be left alone?

IMO, as long as he isn't doing something like distracting drivers and causing accidents he is just an annoyance, not causing any real problem. They should leave him be.

What if he were instead, a perv who hung around the park in his thong making groany porn noises and air-humping passers by? How do you go about writing an ordinance that separates the seriously disturbing kind of semi-nudity from the harmlessly eccentric type?

Some public spaces have an intended use, for which they have been errected and are maintained. Other uses should not impair the original intended use, and such impaiments happen often, forbidding the other use is not unreasonable. For instance if break dancing at a street corner causes or aggrevates a traffic congestion, because there is much pedestrian traffic there, then prohibiting break dancing in certain locations and/or times beats waiting till pedestrians are angry enough to start ramming the break dancers.

With skateboarding in the park and similiar there is the problem, that there are some reckless skaters, who endanger elderly or disabled people and rules for preventing reckless but no other skating are hard to formulate and even harder to execute.

However rules should not come down to "no skateboarding or break dancing ever anywhere", but there should be times and places for thoose activities as well. If you don't have enough space, to make everyone happy, you have a usual resource scarity problem, that should be resolved with some sort of compromise.

An other problem are activities, where annoying other people is actually intended. Like for instance some beggars or charity collectors business model is, that they bring a passer by in a situation, where giving some coins or signing up to support some cause is the way of least resistance to get out of an unpleasant situation. There no amount of space helps. And if something like that happens often, regulating the activity can be better, then waiting till people are angry enough to retailiate themselfs.

This raises a whole other set of issues. "Intended use" is debatable and flexible. For a good stretch of time from the 50s up to the 80s, urban planners around the world designed streets for one use only - moving cars around quickly. All other on-street activities such as commerce, socializing, and playing were seen as obstructions.

Since then, there has been a shift in philosophy and city planners have been moving towards the position that the social uses of streets are an important part of urban life too. So there's been a move towards planning multi-purpose public spaces where sometimes other uses take precedence over traffic flow. For example, roads that had previously been widened were narrowed again in order to give more space to pedestrians and bikes. Cities that had previously discouraged bike riding and roller blading began to encourage them.

To me, if there are many people trying to use public space in ways that the space wasn't intended for, that's an indication that the city planners screwed up, and not that people are doing it wrong. For example, if there are people persisting in sitting on steps and ledges plastered with "no sitting" signs, that means they failed anticipate that this is a place where people would want to sit. I agree that if different uses conflict with each other, then the government needs to step in and work out a compromise.

Space scarity can indeed be a result of bad city planning. And i agree, that if there is a demand for certain activities, then spaces for thoose activities should be provided, if that is possible with reasonable efforts.

But even if city planners are ultimatly to blame, sometimes it is very expensive to undo their faults and you face a serious resource scarity, that can't be easily prevented. And sometimes it is in the nature of activities to conflict. Street performers and sales people want to be at places with lots of audience. Commuting pedestrians want them at streets that are hardly ever used. Skaters want to skateboard in every park in their area. Elderly people, who fear to get hit by skaters want them in places, they never consider to go to themselfs. So you need some regulation even if the city planning was good.

Regulations should not be done with a "get off my lawn, and everything is my lawn" mentality though, even though people with that mentality or people who want to show some demography who the master really is, try to hijack such regulations often.

Would it be reasonable for a city such as St Louis to require street musicians to audition? It seems that city officials have decided that a good compromise between musicians and other street users is that they will allow street musicians, but only if they're competent, because incompetent ones are that much more annoying. They are being sued by two musicians who say that this violates their right to self expression.

I have no idea, what sort of street musicans St. Louis has.

In the underground in Vienna you regualary get some that play somewhat like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK4jyOII67U only more lackluster for a short time and then go around collecting money. (Begging in public transport vehicles is already forbidden, so there is no question of any permits here).

If you have a system with limited permits, and you have many applicants, who do just enough to give a very weak claim to be performers and then do ordinary begging, an audition can be a good idea.

However the position if the auditor is one that seems to be made for petty control freaks, so such an office will need checks and balances.

Disclaimer, i posted the video without checking the sound due to technical difficulties, i hope it's the soundtrack from the movie.

Should begging - not inside public transport vehicles, but on the street - be illegal though?