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Comment by JamesBarney | Hacker News Reader

I really think banning poor individuals from choosing to shop at a dollar store because you assume you know better is elitism.

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Are banning predatory practices and usurious rates of interest, restricting medicines, smoking and gambling etc elitism too? If so, I'm all in favour of it, even when I am the "victim" of said elitism, such as I was when I was a smoker. There need to be limits placed on abusive behaviour, whether individual or corporate. Still don't think it's elitism though.

I don't think banning predatory practices is elitist. Keeping people from being lied to or mislead isn't elitist.

I think banning usurious interest rates can be elitist. But a lot of upper middle class politicians don't understand how expensive it can be to not have money. And getting hit with overdraft fees, having your electricity shut off, or not being able to make it to work because your car broke down can all be very expensive and make the usurious interest rates look cheap.

I don't see the connection but restricting medicine but I do think that non addictive medication is overly restricted.

Smoking and gambling(and drinking) are specific vices and restricting them isn't elitist but banning pall malls would be.

I'm not against elitist policies in principle. Of there is a lot of data that a particular intervention has a strong positive effect than I'm for it. But I'm just suspicious of a bunch upper middle class politicians deciding what's best for a lower class one and legislating away their options.

I might agree with this perspective if third-parties weren't involved, but unfortunately when dependents, often children, are added into the mix I think there is some justification for regulating away options that (at least objectively) can be harmful.

Isn't it elitist to presume that you know how children should be raised better than their parents do?

If it’s elitist to listen to people who have researched a subject (nutritionists, public health experts, etc.) rather than every person who has produced offspring, so be it.

It's not elitist to listen to them.

It is elitist to force others to do so.

Experts have no idea if banning dollar stores will improve the diet of people in the neighborhood, no idea if even if it improves diet that will lead to measureable health outcomes. And even if it leads to measurable effects that those effects are large enough to be worth the inconvenience of not being able to go to a dollar store.

Researchers don't know if even one of those causal links is real, much less all of them.

What is the basis for your claim that "experts" have no idea if banning will work? The posted article was written to counter stories about efforts to limit dollar stores and encourage full-service grocery stores. The story's tool is a paper [0] by economists who analyzed data and found that access to full-service grocery stores does not make a meaningful difference. So those experts (economists) think they do any have idea if it will work, they think it won't. It fits the author's and their publications conservative, small-government beliefs; I can't speak to the quality of the paper.

Anyway, my comment was in response to disdain for experts in favor of parents. That sort of anti-intellectual mindset can hit the road.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/134/4/1793/5492274

> Anyway, my comment was in response to disdain for experts in favor of parents. That sort of anti-intellectual mindset can hit the road.

That sneering disdain for the self-determination of "anti-intellectuals" has led to much human suffering. Rule of experts does not scale. And academia does not necessarily produce superior expertise. Indeed, the endemic, institutional corruption often produces the opposite. Rationalia would be no paradise.

First of all, I'm not saying I know better than parents. I'm saying society can find people that know better than parents.

Second of all, this seems like a question of semantics. I don't know what exactly you mean by elitism, but if you see this as elitist then I find it acceptably elitist for me.

Nice, instaflag rather than have the courage to reply. Might makes right, right? The bubble tends to have that effect on people.

A single flag doesn't bring a comment down. It means that more than one person found your comment in poor enough taste to flag it. It was a bad comment, and hurt the quality of the site. Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

A deeply nested comment like that would not be so flagged by multiple users in a couple of minutes, especially on an article that garnered a total of 54 points and 70 comments. Not enough eyeballs to do that.

You call it a personal attack--I call it a logical observation: one who advocates authoritarianism is a tyrant. Of course, authoritarian tyrants don't like to be called so. "Hurtful" and "problematic" opinions must be shamed.

HN ought to be concerned with the proliferation of authoritarianism rather than calling it out. Oppression flourishes where honest criticism is not allowed. "Democracy dies in darkness," right?

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