Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

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As a society we've worked hard to eradicate things like polio, measels, and other violently contagious diseases that left uncheecked would destroy the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

As a member of that society I have the right to benefit from our collective efforts because those efforts were done for me, for you, for everyone, without exclusion. These things were given to us by our ancestors, by our governments, by our own individual contributions.

Right now there are people working tirelessly and facing extreme risk to elininate the tiniest pockets of polio in the world. They are killed on a worryingly regular basis because of a form of anti-vaxx sentiment: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-36090891

If you're a staunch libertarian your position should be that I can do whatever I want so long as I don't infringe upon your rights, and one of the most fundamental rights is a right to live and do what I please.

Unvaccinated people can strip you of your right to live.

Could use the same argument for vegetarianism, environment causes, gun control, etc.

If it were up to me guns and hard liquor would be banned and cars would have limited speed. These are all things that affect me even if I don't use them.

If you can frame vegetarianism in a way that someone eating meat causes another person direct harm, maybe you have a case.

Environmentally speaking there is more of a clear connection, though it is more of a sliding scale. Is someone smoking next door an imminent threat to my life? Not typically. Is someone experimenting with highly radioactive materials next door an imminent threat to my life? It could very well be.

There's often a lot of grey, but there are times when the threat is obvious. A deliberately unvaccinated child is a serious health risk to everyone they interact with. If there's enough of these children around the risk grows.

Vaccinated children are already rife with disease, they're more vulnerable than adults. Unvaccinated ones may as well be radioactive.

I don't know that hard liquor bans are something you could argue for. America tried that already and it didn't work out at all.

I think it's facinating that we are likely moving to cars with limited speed (driverless controls), and that we have tried banning booze.

At least banning alchohol as a constitutional ammendment was rather ineffective and led to some wild crime and an eventual repeal. On the face of it, though, it's an interesting social experiement whose outcome probably wasn't very obvious at the time. At least to the proponents.

The guns though? I'm not at all sure how America could even try banning that. Perhaps we just need to look to another country to see how that affected society. It also has that awkward bootstrapping problem: how do you take the guns from the people? They're by definition armed, after all...

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