You live in a small town, only a few thousand people. Everyone knows each other and the local diner begins frying up your order as soon as you walk in the door. It's the type of place where people leave their doors unlocked at night and their cars running when they get coffee on cold mornings.
An eleven-year-old girl gets raped and murdered in your town.
The police try to solve the case. All immediate suspects are tested to see if their DNA matches up, but they all come up negative. Time passes and the brutal murder remains unsolved. Suspicions settle in and make the town uneasy. The FBI has a solution - get DNA samples of every male in the town, relatively cheaply, by swabbing the insides of peoples' mouths. By law, these samples are voluntary
Assume that you're male. Would you ideologically approve or be opposed to this measure? If such a measure is passed, would you submit a sample? Now, would you answer be the same if you lived in Las Vegas and the victim was a forty-four-year-old hooker?
“It is a strange paradox that today’s central banks are generally staffed by economists, who by and large profess a belief in a theory which says that their jobs are, at the best, unnecessary, and more likely wealth-destroying. Needless to say, this is not a point widely discussed among respectable economists. Nevertheless, it is an issue worth pondering.”
George Cooper, The Origin of Economic Crises