Why Blackmail is Illegal

Apparently debating whether blackmail should be (il)legal is something that economists do in their spare time.

I kinda recall a couple years ago I looked up the legal definition of blackmailing – I don’t recall why I did this, but it did feel weird to me how you could perfectly legally disclose information (eg. to authorities) but would fall foul of the law once you offer silence for this.

Economists generally don’t seem to talk about power dynamics between social classes – it seems obvious to me that the real reason behind criminalization of “blackmailing” (btw should this be renamed to something else in light of the #BLM movement? @_@) – is the inconvenience the “respectable” ruling class would incur without it in place.

As they say, ignorance is bliss – nobody wants to be ruled by morallly dubious overlords – although they are often exactly that. As such disincentivizing poor peasants from snooping on their nobles’ private lives is obviously something worth legislating for.

Social classes of course persist to this day albeit in slightly different forms.

The only question remaining is why plebs are still allowed to publish their juicy gossip in tabloids? Perhaps it is a matter of scale – the would-have-been-blackmailer, deterred from blackmailing, would sell the information to the best paying tabloid – once. Only one person would profit exactly once from one piece of embarassing information.

The situation would be different if blackmailing is legal. There could be multiple blackmailers, and blackmailers would not necessarily keep their promises. For every piece of embarassing information, the blackmailee would potentially have to pay an unlimited amount of money to keep the hordes of blackmailers happy – even though in the end it would still not guarantee that the information would not eventually be leaked to the public. This puts the blackmailee in an extremely vulnerable position – a situation that, again, should obviously legislated away.