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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Always fascinating to me that people want to take away people’s liberties for their own good. Somehow, this authoritarian streak persists despite being the source of constant human suffering.

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Some liberties have always been taken away in any society: you cannot kill or steal as you please for instance. There is always a need to figure out a good balance between personal liberties and the greater common good.

Gambling with your savings might seem like a personal choice, but in the end there will be bailouts that I will have to pay for. You might not agree with where I draw the line, but ignoring that there has to be line is putting your head in the sand and ignoring reality.

How would you propose to regulate it out of interest? As someone who pretty much lives on investment these days (vanilla stocks, no crypto, no options) with no formal training in the area I'm quite keen to hear why I should have to return to the rat race. I wholeheartedly agree that maxing out credit cards to buy stock/crypto (as someone mentioned earlier) should be regulated however, as that just seems like an absolute ticking timebomb

There are solutions such as regulation for smoking that are incremental -- introduce the concept of a minimal bankroll and minimal accreditation and keep progressively increasing it over the years. The main thing would be an interest in regulating for general population wellbeing, instead of arguing for the rich becoming richer under the pretext of the free market.

I can't blame you for choosing your source of income, it makes sense if you choose what it right for yourself. You are probably a highly talented individual that is leaving the actual value creation to the rest of us though, and one by one people are giving up.

I get what you're saying, but in my mind with regulation like people are calling for, I wouldn't even have had the chance to make a living like that in the first place. To me, regulation means something like "you need a certification", "you need a degree in x", "you need to be registered as a company in y field" which are all larger barriers to entry into the field than trading fees, the potential of losing money in an unregulated market. I also feel it would do more harm than good to the economy (you're likely talking about the US, I'm from the UK, so can only comment on what I know really)..both in terms of people losing out on returns, and banks, investment firms, etc playing silly buggers behind closed doors

What bailouts? Joe down the street declaring bankruptcy because he bet the house on the new shitcoin of the week does not affect me. His credit score being ruined is not my problem. You know what is my problem? Massive companies that can afford to lose it all getting bailouts from my tax dollars. I have no say in that. I'm not fucking giving up securities trading (something that people like John Bogle fought hard to give the layperson) because some people can't educate themselves.

I swear, some people here want to live in a nanny state.

When Joe down the street and a lot of his neighbours go bankrupt they default on their mortgage loans, which can have a cascading effect, as it actually did in 2008. The taxpayer that chose not to gamble in the stockmarket will foot most of that bill, part through inflation and part through actual bailouts and stimulus packages.

One person is not important, but if a million people engage in some economic activity we're all affected in the long term, so should have a word to say about this.

When I included the phrase “for their own good”, I intended it to have semantic non-phatic meaning indicating restrictions on liberty intended to protect the restricted individual. Protection against self harm has different moral bases than protection against harm from others.

Your comment addresses the latter. Unfortunately, that means it’s wholly non-sequitur.

> Somehow, this authoritarian streak persists despite being the source of constant human suffering

Do you have any examples? The classic "authoritarian" human suffering example is the Nazis, or communist Russia - and I don't think either of those claimed to take away liberties for the sake of "their own good".

A classic example is the prevention of the use of cannabis as an analgesic in palliative care.

Hmm, that's an example of authoritarianism?

Cannabis (might) have real implications on mental health, I'm not sure I agree.

Yes, everything “may have real implications” on something. Removing agency from dying individuals, as anti-cannabis laws do, is most certainly paternalistic authoritarianism.

And come on, we’re past this point in the medicine now. By the time any mental health implications take root, the person is dead. That’s why I said “palliative care”. Anyone refusing marijuana for analgesia to someone suffering from terminal illness is violating the Hippocratic Oath. The science is clear.

You didn't explicitly say "dying individuals", palliative care doesn't just apply to terminal/chronic illness.

I'm not sure what cannabis offer over Opioids, but if state authoritarianism is limited to such a niche I wouldn't worry over it.

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