An Alternative for Age Requirement Laws

We all love to hate America’s drinking age requirements. Everyone is familiar with this argument,

“If we can choose to die for our country at 18, shouldn’t we be mature enough to choose to drink alcohol?”

Whenever a lot of people preach the same one-liner argument, I switch into skeptic mode. There is a good chance the majority of people saying this one-liner are emotionally attached to their position. If you are 18 and cannot find anyone to buy you alcohol for a party, you are going to concur with like-minded opinions, especially the ones that are easy to understand.

What is this argument really about? Does it show the ridiculousness of government age regulations or something else? There is obviously a certain age that people reach when they are mature enough to make a particular decision. A 5-year-old is not mature enough to decide to drink alcohol, and therefore shouldn’t be given the right to buy alcohol. What about a 6-year-old? Or 7-year-old? Eventually you will reach an age when that person is mature enough.

The government is faced with a problem, they know there exists an age where a person is mature enough to make certain decisions, but at what age should they set the law to? Quantifying the age of maturity for a country as a whole is impossible. The average age of maturity varies in every state, region, or even county!

This brings me to my next point, who should have jurisdiction on age regulation? In my opinion this jurisdiction should be delegated to individual cities. There could be some company that assesses the average age of maturity in a city. This assessment will include the demographics, the violence rate, number of young people, teen drunk driving incidents, etc. Then each city can decide upon an appropriate age of maturity. This could be a good incentive for cities to be safer. If your city has lower age requirements, more people might move there and therefore house prices go up.