Hacker News Reader

Comment by czhu12 | Hacker News Reader

An article like this can be written about almost every vice we have in our society.

Social media, student loans for example. What about fast food or alcohol?

Payday loans, corporate advertising, video game addictions, pornography addictions.

Does the government need to play a larger role in all these areas? It’s probably not hard to put together a compelling piece on the damage of bad parenting, perhaps the government should also have a larger role there? I argue it’s deeply irresponsible and even immoral to buy a flashy car if you can’t adequately provide for your kids, should we legislate that?

It’s not clear to me that gambling is any more dangerous than anything listed above.

It seems every week an article like this comes out and the immediate reaction is to legislate it out of existence, it’s terrifying to see how quickly people (especially a more educated audience on HN) are willing to legislate things they don’t like.

View on HN

Yes, I do think we can come up with reasonable limits for some of these things at least.

The government already does limit bad parenting. Probably not the level you're talking about, but social services will step in if they believe kids are being abused. Personally, I think the government should do more to ensure kids have more options for peer and adult social contact outside of their cloistered nuclear family, and ditto for new mothers, and that that would help with bad parenting a great deal.

Payday loans are a big problem. People should be able to declare bankruptcy to remove predatory loans.

Fast food is causing real dietary problems. I do think we should do more to ensure people understand how what they're eating affects them. Putting nutrition information on food was a good step, and maybe we can come up with more improvements.

For sports gambling and gambling in general, I believe that anyone behind on their child support should be banned from gambling. I also believe that people should be able to put themselves on a "banned" list with a 1 month waiting period to be able to take themselves off.

Legislation gave us clean air and water, buildings that fall down much less, a monetary system that evaporates peoples' savings much less, food that isn't poisonous, schools that spread less disease, safer cars that use less gas, more power efficient homes, and on and on and on. So yes, the educated audience on HN does want to solve problems with rules and incentives.

But by this logic, why not just make it entirely illegal to gamble? Regardless of child support?

I'm just saying there are some legislative solutions that would be effective at reducing major harms without banning the thing altogether.

I'm very against knee-jerk bans without any real thought. However, the idea that legislative solutions are always bad is equally stupid. Legislation has fixed many very real problems, and used properly, is a good tool for fixing future issues too.

I don’t think we’re in disagreement. I’m responding to the article which mostly advocated for banning sports betting

HN is paternalistic to the extreme. An entire community of people who were one of the smartest growing up, and now think they should dictate how everyone else lives their lives, using guns (I mean the government). The tut-tutting that is rampant in comments is par for the course.

Individual liberty and responsibility has always been a tough sell, but it’s still worth encouraging. Taken to its logical conclusion, no one would even be able to raise their kids given the risks to the children from a bad parent - much safer to give all children straight to the government to raise safely. After all, if even a single child is abused by a terrible parent, isn’t that too many?

>Does the government need to play a larger role in all these areas? It’s probably not hard to put together a compelling piece on the damage of bad parenting, perhaps the government should also have a larger role there?

Forgive me if I don't want a government that spends a trillion+ dollars a year on endless war to be the moral arbiter of what behaviors adults are allowed to engage in.

Is it really terrifying? If you are old enough you already lived through this stuff being illegal and you know what - it wasn't so bad. Having it come back inch by inch is not something I think is all that great. I actually wish for the days when society didn't want gambling.

Addiction is certainly a universal challenge.

However, there's a peculiar thing with gambling where it exploits the difficult economic realities underlying the rest of America's infrastructure.

I'm generally with you, particularly on the basis of non-aggression principles of libertarianism. That said, I'm not 100% sure that I actually think of all advertising as non-aggressive. There's room for a whole deep dive here on whether or not the coercion in toying with what we've learned about human psychology in the last century or so amounts to something that should be guarded against as much as physical assault, and I'm not so much weighing in one way or another but definitely looking at holding the door open for more discussion and analysis.

As far as the gambling, drugs, porn, excess shopping, and other bad habits go though, yes, any attempt to rein these in usually results in a treatment that is worse than the disease.

It is quite difficult to end up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt by eating too much fast food or watching too much porn.

What percentage of people who participate in some form of gambling go on to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars? I'd argue it's also very difficult to end up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt gambling.

Eating too much fast food can result in diseases that can cost serious money to fix.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com