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Comment by Two4 | Hacker News Reader

By your logic, heroin dealers benefit society too.

Not just heroin dealers: contract killers also benefit society according to this logic. They're in business, their customers give them money for a service the customers think is valuable, etc. They may not benefit you directly, and may make your life worse (if you're their target), but bruce thinks they're fine since they do "useful" things and have paying customers!

Contract killing is not analogous to tobacco companies. Both big tobacco and heroin dealers base their business on the exploitation of addiction, and are a nett detractor of societal value in all ways except one: creating shareholder value.

Strangely enough, I do actually think there's a time and a place to kill, but that's not the norm for hired killers.

You're comparing legal to illegal. That's kinda moving the goal posts a bit.

By definition illegal things are things society as a whole have declared impermissible. By contrast cigarettes and advertising are legal, meaning that society has determined them to have value.

Not surprisingly illegal things still happen because there is still demand by some minority for that service. Society as s whole though has decided that the negative effect on others outweighs the positive effect on the few.

So you genuinely believe that cigarettes "have value"? You have some warped views if you believe that.

as long as it is counted in the gdp (not the gdp per capita, it's only the people who care about that sort of silly thing)

if you ask some people, the answer is yes.

(The people that want to legalize drugs and drug distribution)

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