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Comment by tss | Hacker News Reader

I'll preface with saying that I am 18 and I support lowering the drinking age, but there is a fallacy that needs to be pointed out. A common argument is that if you are old enough for the army then you should be able to drink. This is an illogical argument. The reason why 18-21 year olds make good soldiers is why they make bad drinkers-- their decision making ability is not fully developed and they have not matured completely. There are great arguments for lowering the drinking age, but the fact that 18 year olds can join the army or be drafted is not one of them.

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The point isn't how great their decision-making capability is (or not). The point is that we've regarded them with enough decision-making capability to do lots more harmful things than have a few beers on Friday night.

And it's not just the army. Being able to vote is one of the most powerful choices we allow citizens (I'd vote firearm ownership as #2) It wouldn't make sense to trust people to elect leaders and not with alcohol.

The problem with your comment is that you don't really grow up until around 35 or so. I don't see anybody making the case to raise the drinking, driving, and voting age to that age. The goal isn't to wait until you reach some level of decision-making ability, it's to be consistent between various freedoms that are available to you.

And the young have always fought wars. As it should be. When you get older, it's not that you somehow get too smart to have duty or honor, it's that direct war-fighting is a very boring activity punctuated with extreme athletic moments. 45-year-olds simply wouldn't survive long enough to be worth the training you'd give them.

"The problem with your comment is that you don't really grow up until around 35 or so."

Har. Lemme guess...you're 36?

The problem with age as a metric of "growing up", is that the cutoff is always older than you are, but younger than the guy who makes the rules.

Kind of a tough pill to swallow, eh?

In any case, my point isn't that people should receive some benefit based on maturity. It's just the opposite. We live in a society where kids at 12 can have credit cards, at 16 can drive, etc. It's perfectly fine, imo, to allow people to do things while they are still immature to some degree.

The "guy who makes the rules" is the guy who votes. That's people 18 years and older.

The reason alcohol is regulated while lots of other things aren't (hey, tree-climbing isn't safe either) is because it's easy to regulate and it has easily quantifiable impacts on those who use (abuse?) it and those around them. "Good judgement" more generally can't be regulated and can't be so easily quantified (or even identified, if you're a politician).

And re: 45-year-olds - there are less of them in combat for very practical reasons: a) they've already retired (45-20 is 25, and most people join younger than 25) b) they're promoted into ranks that don't get into direct combat.

I think the notion that a 45-year old would have a lower survival rate is just silly, unless you've got some particular set of facts to back it up.

Well, if 18 year olds are good soldiers because they aren't fully mature, why not allow 14 year olds to be soldiers? Or 8 year olds for that matter... after all, as African warlords have shown, even a small child can be a great soldier with enough cocaine.

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