Hacker News Reader

You are hurting no one but yourself

Easily debatable.

Not that we should be providing government healthcare anyway.

Also debatable, and if single-payer healthcare does exist it implicitly means that obesity has an effect on others. It's silly to take liberalism to an extreme.

there is only so much land, so much sunlight

Land used for agriculture has actually stayed the same or slightly declined since 1990.

When there are good times, people multiply

Evidence suggests that in developed economies, people do precisely the opposite.

there are good times, people multiply. Poverty is inherent to nature -- some bears are born rich (big and strong), while others scrape by their entire lives, and may or may not reproduce. If they all had as much salmon as they wanted, their population would increase until there was poverty again.

Humans are not bears. A large number of people have essentially unlimited access to food, and yet done reproduce en masse. I expect, though I haven't looked, that birth rates would actually inversely correlated with wealth.

Only workaround is eugenics

You have failed to demonstrate a problem to be worked around.

I would rather have freedom to reproduce and poverty than totalitarianism and the "theoretical promise" of no poverty

A preposterous non sequitur, given that it's quite possible to imagine ways to eliminate poverty without reverting to totalitarianism.

> Humans are not bears. A large number of people have essentially unlimited access to food, and yet done reproduce en masse. I expect, though I haven't looked, that birth rates would actually inversely correlated with wealth.

You should look, then. Wealth is positively correlated with fertility.

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1692/2015...

What's inversely correlated with fertility is education, but fertility declines with rising education only because parents realize it is advantageous to spend more resources per child.

> Evidence suggests that in developed economies, people do precisely the opposite.

That's because you're arguing from a false premise. Perceptively, then, maybe things are not as good as you would think (especially not as good as people in the SV developer bubble think), otherwise people would multiply at a much higher rate. I implore you to do some actual math to see how much one needs to earn to be able to have kids above the replacement rate (so, around 2.2), without receiving any government assistance (thus entering a poverty trap) and where that earning rate resides relative to the median household income in the US right now.

The results may surprise you.

> A preposterous non sequitur, given that it's quite possible to imagine ways to eliminate poverty without reverting to totalitarianism.

One great way to eliminate poverty is to keep redefining the poverty line until there are no longer people in poverty! And it's completely totalitarianism-free.

> Economic signaling based on opinion of good/bad is the bane of the free market.

Must we worship at the altar of the free market a priori?

The "free market" in the case of food has had disastrous health consequences by optimizing for profits over health. The entire incentive structure is to manufacture foods with an addictive quality out of the cheapest possible ingredients, because the negative health outcomes are too distant and dilute to be factored in in any meaningful way. There is a marketing advantage to claiming some processed food is healthy, and there is ample science available that can be distilled down into an unending cycle of specious claims that fall apart on the mildest inspection, but who really has the time to evaluate those claims anyway?

That's not to say government regulation is a silver bullet, but the government does ostensibly represent the people, and what other organization has the clout to balance out the fundamentally broken incentive structures within the food industry?

Nope, a government that aims to prevent fraud produces the healthiest society. See my comments on the FDA/USDA discussion -- it would be best if they advised the public, but did not outright block products/services.

Their advice means precisely zero when your choices are the cheap, processed, unhealthy food you can afford or the more expensive, healthy option that you can't.

The parent commenter is right, the free market optimizes for cheap and addictive because it's what sells and what will continue producing sales for many years. There's absolutely no incentive for companies to produce even cheap healthy food because the addictive qualities are a much more secure bet that your customer will come back to your food in the future.

The incentive is that many people will pay a premium for healthy foods, which is why companies like Whole Foods exist and do quite well. Certainly not all, especially those who would have previously been facing hunger, so the industry will always exist. I agree there. So you can tax it and make it more expensive and inaccessible for poor people, but that does nothing to make producing healthy foods any easier. That's my point.

> Economic signaling based on opinion of good/bad is the bane of the free market.

Sure, but "a third party intervening in prices is the antithesis of a price system where the producer sets their own price" is an empty tautology without any argument for why the world is better off for people being able to obtain soda more cheaply and balancing the budget with a non-distortionary poll tax instead.

Similarly,if you're going to make sub-Malthusian arguments that free food is "exactly how you end up with famines" it would help if you could name one example of a famine significantly influenced by prior availability of free food. In the interests of fairness, I'll name three that definitely weren't: the Irish potato famine, the Holodomor and the Bengal famine. Developed countries are a long way ahead of the era where free food is likely to have a statistically significant effect on the birth rate and all the data would suggest causality ran in the opposite direction with birthrates having fallen sharply against a backdrop of increasing access to better nutrition and increasing universal welfare access. It's developing countries, where people have to ensure enough surviving descendants to guarantee they continue to be fed in old age, that are the ones with the higher birthrates and rapidly growing populations...

> Soda tax: no

Soda tax is a way (albeit a somewhat flawed one) for state and local governments to nullify the effects of agricultural grain subsidies, which is something I wholeheartedly support. If rural constituencies have a right to spend urban tax money to support their crops, then urban constituencies have a right to claw that money back with a tax on products made with those crops. Now, if the federal government dropped all grain subsidies tomorrow, I'd drop my support for a soda tax.

> It will catch up.

No it won't--TFRs have been dropping across the world for a few decades now, and soon it will be at or below the replacement rate. People don't have kids for shits and giggle or just because they can--it's just that in the past, for agricultural and pastoral societies children were short-term investments, not long-term ones, and child mortality was high, so having more kids==better. It takes a while to shed traditional wisdom, but it does happen.

> I would rather have freedom to reproduce and poverty than totalitarianism and the "theoretical promise" of no poverty

Speak for yourself. If I had to give up reproductive freedom in exchange for prosperity and all other freedoms, I'd do so in a heartbeat. You don't need to control every aspect of citizens' lives in order for them to have less children.

Or maybe they should just get rid of the subsidies.

Maybe you should visit India or the Philippines and let me know how soon you expect that cultural shift to hit them. Something happening in your world does not equal global paradigm shift. The western world is not "the world." I do agree that it's happening in western Europe, though.

I was speaking for myself (in case you missed the use of "I"). You go ahead and believe all the promises that strongmen tell you in exchange for little bits of freedom. The NSA, FDA, etc. will take care of you. Sleep easy champ.

> Or maybe they should just get rid of the subsidies.

Oh we in the cities would love to get rid of the subsidies, but rural areas are overrepresented under our political systems. Clawing back the subsidies is the second-best option.

> Maybe you should visit India or the Philippines and let me know how soon you expect that cultural shift to hit them.

It's hitting them already. India's TFR is down to 2.4, which is pretty close to replacement, and while the Philippines is still at 3 or so, it's still down from 6-7 a generation ago.

> The NSA, FDA, etc. will take care of you. Sleep easy champ.

I had to live under the Ministry of State Security and the People's Armed Police for the first decade of my life. Compared to those guys, NSA are a bunch of cuddly teddy bears. Hell, they can't even arrest anybody!

> Pollution tax: yes; you are being taxed for affecting others. Soda tax: no; you are hurting no one but yourself, and it is a stretch to say otherwise.

In this case you should consider: who is hurting whom? The research of Ariely and the experimental results of the marketing industry have made it clear that your choice to buy soda is not simply a transaction between yourself and the grocery store. It involves the government’s need for cheap calories to prevent social unrest, and it involves the sugar industry’s ongoing efforts to keep carbohydrate overloads socially acceptable. Soda is the industry hurting you.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/12/the-food-industry-is-...

I subscribe to chaos theory, so yes, any action has enormous repercussions in the future. But policy-wise, I don't think what you are saying is at odds with what I'm saying. If you get rid of the soda tax AND the subsidies on corn (syrup), it balances out nicely.

>Not that we should be providing government healthcare anyway.

I believe that healthcare is a basic human right.

/s? It's a service. A product. It didn't even exist 200 years ago. There is certainly nothing fundamental about it.

Because I think it's really important people stop thinking healthcare is a fundamental human right: Somebody has to provide healthcare for you. There is limited supply. There is INFINITE demand. That's right, infinite demand. People demand exponentially more healthcare as they get closer to death, and the majority of a person's lifelong costs are incurred in the final year of their life. The entire healthcare sector couldn't keep one person alive forever, and there is a diminishing return on each dollar that is spent on keeping a dying person alive for another hour (measured in hours/$).

Slavery also existed 200 years ago, and yet "not being a slave" is a basic human right.

Equally good healthcare for everyone, independent of their wealth, is a worthwhile goal for society, and all but one of the so-called developed countries have pretty much achieved it.

Your first point is illogical. It was a violation of basic human rights then and it still is now. The underlying tenet (liberty) is independent of "not being a slave" and has nothing to do with whether slavery has been invented yet/is being practiced. Make sense?

That's a nice fantasy, but it's also a fantasy. If you think Canada has equal healthcare for all, then please explain why various prime ministers and EU dignitaries come to the US for major operations.

On a tangent, I do think the US has an arguably worse healthcare system than some of these socialist countries, but not because the socialist system is good -- it's because we have such a distorted market. We have Medicare/Medicaid which basically social healthcare, almost any prescription for $5, but it's even worse than social healthcare because it only applies to some of the population, driving prices up for those who don't yet qualify. We have overbearing occupational licensing. It is TOO hard to become a doctor. We have overbearing malpractice regulation -- a huge percentage of a doctor's salary goes to malpractice insurance, making regulators/lawyers richer. We have a stifling FDA, which combined with our over-powered IP system grants monopolies to drug companies and enables price gouging.

We have nothing resembling a free healthcare market, my friend, so don't blame capitalism for America's problems.

I don't know about Canada. But for various reasons I believe that healthcare cannot be a free non-distorted market. You cannot choose too often when or where or by whom you'll be operated; some people (the elder or those who have genetic issues or those that have a relatively dangerous self-employed job, for example) need healthcare more than others; patients obviously die during surgery putting doctors at a higher risk of malpractice litigations; and so on. My point is that the only way to mitigate all of this is to build an economy of scale, and single-payer/mandatory insurance is exactly that.

Human rights are things that are inherent to being human. Freedom, liberty, etc (to the extent that you are not denying the same to another person).

Health care requires someone else to do something to provide it. Therefore it isn't a basic human right.

Freedom requires other people to enforce laws that protect those freedoms.

You mean if I don't have the freedom to decide I don't like freedom, your goons will punch some freedom into me? Sound very un-free to me.

Reminds me I still have my unread copy of Nozick gathering dust.

Human rights are things that are inherent to being human.

That is your definition. If you look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [1], the definition they employ is much broader. E.g.

  Article 25.
  (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate  for the health
  and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing,
  housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to
  security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability,  widowhood,
  old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
  (2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance.
  All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social
  protection.

[1] http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

Will this negatively affect immigration policy? Has it already?

Well, we can always eat the immigrants!

> you are hurting no one but yourself, and it is a stretch to say otherwise. Not that we should be providing government healthcare anyway.

educate me here. but ignoring government healthcare, wouldn't private healthcare companies have higher costs for health conscious members if many of their members are making poor health decisions?

if someone chooses to smoke cigarettes and ends up getting lung cancer, I don't feel great about paying for their lung transplant even with private healthcare.

You're not. It's factored into their rates to the best of the insurance company's ability. Come on, this is HN...

Okay, if you want to be like that, then:

The money these people spend on insurance could have been better spent elsewhere in the economy.

And this is where I make a hard cutoff between what is expected for the social good and what is clearly infringing on individual rights. There is no perfect legal framework that knows how to balance individual freedoms with impacts to the "social good," so the heuristic I typically use is: if you are directly and provably infringing on someone else's rights (e.g. you can prove a factory is outputting a negative form of pollution, CO2), then it should be legally addressed. If it's an indirect concern like the above (how direct something is is also arbitrary, sure, so it comes down to being reasonable) which also assumes that the economy has a right to a person's money, then I would generally say leave it alone. Reasonable?

I thought we abandoned Malthusianism a century ago.

Humans need a lot more than food to "reproduce". And there's plenty of proof that as people move up the pyramid of needs having a litany of kids becomes a chore few people want.

Unfortunately, Malthusianism was never abandoned at all. I graduated from high school only ten years ago, and Malthus is accurate, up-to-the-minute doctrine as far as my high school and university courses were concerned.

Reminds me of Amdahl's Law... There will always be a pyramid that has more people on the bottom (i.e. increasing the population), and the reproductive tendencies of the minority of the population are mathematically insignificant. But let's assume you meant to refer to the general availability of modern goods/services, which is indeed increasing for everyone on the pyramid. I don't have the numbers there, but I believe cultural changes / improvements in birth control with voluntary adoption / technology could slow the tide, but we're still animals driven by evolution. This isn't a characteristic that will be going away anytime soon.

UN statistics prove that fertility rates are going down around the world. Even the lowest of the low will reach fertility rates around the replacement rate of 2.1 by 2050.

Yes, the population will increase until 2010 by most estimates, but it will increase at a decreasing rate.

And if as animals driven by evolution we have 1-2 kids per couple we still achieve our evolutionary goal while maintaining balance with nature.