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Comment by f38zf5vdt | Hacker News Reader

In terms of burdening the already dysfunctional healthcare and criminal justice systems of the US, it sounds like it works great. If the junkies no longer exist and less frequently get HIV, their cost to society is less than if they were alive, disease spreading, and committing crime.

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Why not extend this to everyone? When your projected costs to society exceed your projected benefit to society you get ground into food for the rest?

There is a reason economics is called "the dismal science". Most resources on the planet are finite and their consumption is a zero-sum game. If one less drug addict means having the public resources to supply one more diabetic child with life-saving insulin, which would you choose?

Essentially all choices real people make are not economically optimal.

> Most resources on the planet are finite and their consumption is a zero-sum game.

This is such a ridiculous viewpoint on a hacker forum. There are no intrinsic resources - iron ore is just a bunch of rocks, crude oil is a toxic sludge, Uranium is a bunch of radioactive ore.

Economy is not a zero sum game, it's about allocating current resources to expand future ones (AKA growth)

There is only one hospitable planet. Observe how we have treated it.

That’s a false choice that doesn’t exist and nothing more than a thought experiment.

> Why not extend this to everyone?

They already implicitly did. Turns out the dysfunctional criminal justice and medical system the praise affect more than just addicts. Who would have thought.

This comment is an excellent example of how you can openly call for violence against the vulnerable on HN without censure or consequence as long as you do it in a certain tone.

Saying that we shouldn’t enable certain behavior is not violence. Violence is violence, stop messing with the meaning of words.

What is the meaningful difference between killing someone yourself and letting them die when it's in your power to prevent it?

Saying that a certain population should die because of their criminal nature and high "cost to society" is straight up nazi shit. What's the policy implementation of that opinion just curious? It really doesn't get more clear than this.

I am sure you currently work with or have family members who secretly are addicts. Labeling them as a cost to society, disease spreading, and committing crime and justifying their death instead of talking about them as people in pain is definitely disgusting and not the type of discourse I would have expected from this site. But hey, keep on with your reductionism as justification for complicity in peoples deaths. Also remember, they can't get needles not because they don't want to buy them but because it is illegal to sell them.

Advocating that the system be built such that it solves a problem by having people die certainly sounds an awful lot like advocacy for violence to me.

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