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Comment by ythl | Hacker News Reader

Is it better we have full agency and can potentially abuse things (sugar/fat, guns, drugs) or have limited agency that protects us from ourselves in the interest of public welfare?

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I prefer freedom, but freedom comes with responsibility for your choices. That means no subsidized or free health care when you make poor choices.

Conversely, that is why socialism inherently limits freedom. As soon as I am responsible for your "needs" (health, food, childcare), I will start demanding that you make choices I feel are good ones (good diet, productive career so you can provide for yourself, good family planning choices, etc.).

Define a poor choice.

Would that be a job that circumstantially for all intents and purposes requires you to sit down for 8+ hours a day. Is that a poor choice? Would that take away my healthcare subsidy?

Is playing American Football, or kickboxing a similarly poor choice?

Would - and here's where I get facetious in a hope of highlighting the issue with the way you raise your choices/free healthcare point - knowingly continuing the pregnancy of a child with Downs Syndrome be regarded as a poor choice?

Finally, who decides?

This is exactly my point. When Sally has to pay the consequences for Joe's choices, she will have her own ideas about what Joe should do, and try to force him to do so using her vote.

This turns ordinary differences of opinion or culture into political fights.

If Sally doesn't have to pay for Joe's poor choices, Joe can figure out for himself what he feels is best, and that's called freedom.

> Define a poor choice.

Smoking cigarettes.

If you're the kind of person who feels entitled to tell others what to do to begin with. I'm perfectly happy to pay taxes so everyone can have socialized health care, and to stay out of other people's choices.

The more one pays for the choices of others, the more they feel entitled to be influence those choices.

If the health care costs keep going up, and/or they start rationing/queueing, that may have a big enough impact on you that you change your opinion.

Even if you keep your opinion, when you vote for socialism you are voting to force everyone to pay for Joe's poor choices. They might not be so generous.

If you want to just pay into a no-strings-attached social fund, and not force everyone else, that would preserve freedom.

It is an interesting dilemma, isn't it? One I think about quite a bit. One way to view this dilemma is that we recognize that we have tendencies as part of our human psychology to do things that are not in our long term best interests. We're not perfectly rational actors. But since we can discover these tendencies, we have the opportunity to put into practice habits and conventions that prevent us from falling for our own foibles.

I think your phrase "protects us from ourselves" is apt. I struggle a bit with the "limited agency" aspect of it as it sounds like it could have negative connotations, though it's accurate in a strict sense.

I think this is related to us looking out for each other. Where's the line between limiting someone's agency in some malicious sense and honestly trying to be a good person? Can we look out for people we don't know personally? How does this work when we're looking out for the community as a whole?

I think this is a good question. If you choose to down vote, I'd appreciate it if you'd also take the time to reply in a comment.

The quote from C. S. Lewis about a "tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims" is the worst kind of tyranny is very appropriate. There is a strong difference between being told what we should eat vs what we can eat.

Should minors be able to purchase alcohol unfettered and untaxed?

It's nearly universally accepted that minors lack the ability to fully realize what their choices entail, e.g. juvenile court, age of consent. Applying the same rules to minors and adults is not a good solution.

I'd argue in the face of multi-billion dollar marketing and truthiness by Big Food (e.g. creative ways to include sugar on a list of ingredients to distort the volume of its content) , that many adults also "lack the ability to fully realize what their choices entail".

... so what makes you believe that those same adults have the ability to choose representatives that are capable of such decision-making?

Tax negative externalities of firms that produce such goods without reservation or exemption. It sucks but it's the most logical thing to do in this context. Most importantly, it doesn't levy the tax on a single issue but on all goods which have them (cars, phones, medicines, etc all have some negative externality on society). I doubt it'll ever come to be since it seems the modern liberal mind set is to ban rather than properly levy a tax to cover the costs of current damage done by given producers.

So long as what you do does not affect me directly, you should be allowed the liberty to do as you may, even if it puts your life (and only yours) at risk.

Am I sharing the cost of your health care?

Do you smoke? Drink?

Better yet, do you sit for much of the day?

Is your smoking and drinking so excessive that it's putting your life (and only yours) at risk?

If so, then yes, it might make sense for me to intervene.

(just to be clear, we're talking about the OP's statement here, not sugary drinks)

Would it matter if the cost is shared in common as a tax? This seems like the best option considering people assume the alternative must be that they are the only ones with the burden when all would in fact share it. His taxes cover your burdens and your taxes cover his. Are you both even then? Or are you going to nickel/dime every human you meet that consumes sweets on occasion?

I would never tell someone to give up their individual liberty so that we can save a buck in an system that has far greater issues contributing towards cost inflation. Our freedoms and our liberties are fundamental to our being a free society; they should be treasured and not bartered.

Sometimes the government needs to step in. (in no particular order:) lead paint, DDT, opioids, microbeads, antibacterial soaps, ...

Sometimes the government gets it wrong, of course: prohibition, pot, ...

I don't know where sugary drinks fall on this scale, but they're definitely on it.

Banning of DDT has led to literally millions of deaths due to malaria. Those who advocated for it and still do today are genocidal monsters.

So that one should probably be under your "gets it wrong" category.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/DDT#DDT_bans_and_mass_murder

> Horrifically stupid wingnuts and experts for hire will sometimes imply that a supposed worldwide ban on DDT has killed millions of people by giving them malaria or some other mosquito-borne disease, and that Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring was responsible for the alleged ban. The myth seems to have originated from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and from libertarian Roger Bate (and is promoted by his organization Africa Fighting Malaria).

> Carson devoted some of her book into weighing the pros and cons of DDT use,[4] but her findings did not lead to a global ban. DDT got banned in dozens of countries, but there was (and still is) no global ban on DDT; only agricultural use is almost globally banned. Places with deadly mosquito-borne illnesses still use DDT, and in some places excessive use has led to the development of DDT-resistant mosquitoes.[5][6] In fact, the drastic reduction of DDT use in agriculture delayed the onset of resistance in mosquitoes.

> Not only is DDT still approved by the WHO for use against malaria (in indoor residual spraying,[wp] which is the spraying of walls of a home so a mosquito landing after it bites should get a fatal dose), but the Persistent Organic Pollutants Treaty (POPs) has a special clause for DDT.[7] Any nation may endorse the treaty calling for an end to DDT; but any nation may also use DDT at any time, for severe health reasons, by essentially writing a letter to WHO saying, "We have a health problem we think DDT may be useful to combat, so we're going to use DDT."[8]

Or from https://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2014/05/30/yes-malaria-is-s... :

> 4. DDT was banned ONLY for agriculture use in the U.S. It was banned in a few European nations. [Addition, December 30, 2014: In fact, the U.S. action against DDT by EPA specifically called for DDT use in any fight against a vector borne disease, like malaria.]

> 5. DDT has never been banned in Africa or Asia.

Or from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Convention_on_Persis... :

> [The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants] specifically permits the public health use of DDT for the control of mosquitoes (the malaria vector).

>Sometimes the government needs to step in. (in no particular order:)

Let's see what you got here because I think you're being naive.

>lead paint

That causes harm to everyone both directly (health risks) and indirectly (disposal costs). So the ban on lead paint was a benefit for us all.

>DDT

Ditto.

>opioids

Nope, they're regulated. Morphine is a form of them.

>microbeads

This is the same as the DDT and lead paint items. Common risk but indirectly through how they harm fish stock which are part of the food web that makes the nitrogen cycle possible.

>antibacterial soaps

Yet again, indirect harm to all.

I've yet to discern a pattern in your argument that shows where sugary sodas are bad. Obesity sucks, I'm a big fat blob here so I know the damage it does personally (bad back and probably going to get heart disease at this rate). What you should notice that health issues like this are covered under insurance and sodas can be hit with a sin tax to cover additional costs. Trying to go out of our way to ban stuff like this is misplaced as the individual consumer won't ever be able to cover the cost. Producers of such goods can but since our tax code is a mess it's a miracle we get any taxes from them. So if you want to really hit who is doing harm it would be the producers of such goods. From sodas to cars every good comes with a part of it's risks (that harms) socialized but it's profits privatized. That means we should tax firms to cover those negative externalities and not individuals who consume them.

Seeing that obesity is an epidemic, it's clear to me that people aren't able to self-regulate. It's not that this generation of humans are worse than the previous, it's just that we've created a food landscape where the bad stuff is cheap and the most accessible. Individual choice and education won't fix this anytime soon.

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