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Comment by eplanit | Hacker News Reader

"Diet soda, dunno what to do with that one."

Let people decide for themselves? Alcohol is unhealthy, so it should be banned. Hamburgers are high fat and environmentally impactful, so those should be banned, too. Let's not forget cigarettes....

Yes people should opt to not consume unhealthy stuff, but how much authoritarianism do you really want?

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Banning all of those won't work - remember the Prohibition? - but there's plenty of discouragement things going on, at least on this side of the pond. Alcohol and tobacco are heavily taxed, tobacco can no longer be advertised for, displayed, or be in any kind interesting (bland packaging), and that's after they had to have big warnings about the health risks of smoking. And there's plans to introduce sugar taxes - which I would be more on board with if those taxes were used to subsidize and lower the price of 'good' food / essentials.

In the US, we might not even need to tax sugar. We could try just ending the massive subsidies for it (and corn).

Why can’t government just stay out of it? I don’t recall electing a government to be my parents. Government should build roads and have a Navy but why should a government “encourage” healthy behaviors, etc. Are people unable to be adults on their own?

OTOH I'm not sure casting people into the wild to deal, all on their own, with megacorps employing hundreds or thousands dedicated to convincing people to make bad choices is a great idea, either.

I'm not convinced Rugged Individualism and anything like the modern economy are compatible, in any kind of way in which the outcome of trying to have both is pleasant. It may be a "choose one" kind of situation.

The government is great for collective action necessary in situations that resemble the prisoner’s dilemma, where incentives of individual agents lead them to take non-pareto-optimal decisions.

Things like breaking up monopolies, mandating open access to infrastructure, and, yes, countering the effects of companies and advertisers manipulating us and exploiting our weaknesses.

> Let people decide for themselves? Alcohol is unhealthy, so it should be banned.

Our societies socialise the costs of peoples’ bad decisions, so it can’t be 100% laissez-faire. That said, I disagree with the Prohibitionist instinct. Adding a tax that pays for the edge-case costs seems to make the most sense.

I wonder if we'd need to tax the vegetarians for living too long and spending a lot of taxpayer dollars in their extended elderly years. Maybe we should actually subsidize the folks cheeseburgering their way to sudden cardiac death.

So much misinformation. Vegetarians don’t live longer. And cheeseburger eaters don’t die sooner in general.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/do-vegetarians-live-longer...

Then let’s stop socializing the costs of people’s bad decisions.

For some reason it sometimes seems as if people would rather everybody is responsible for everybody else's bad decisions but never their own. It's crazy, I know.

I would also like to imprison people who stand blocking moving walkways and escalators so I am comfortable with a high degree of authoritarianism as long as it is perfectly aligned with my wants.

I realize this is not a very practical worldview.

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