However smoking is still legal, in Denmark and the US. In the US, tobacco use kills 7x as many as the oft-cited opiate “epidemic”, yet you don’t even need a prescription for cigarettes.
Either we need a nanny state, or we don’t. Pick one and be consistent.
Personally I’d prefer the world where we mandate labels and remove all restrictions on sale/distribution/use of chemicals for ingestion, along with HARSH penalties for causing others to ingest your byproducts without consent (ie secondhand smoke). Let adults make their own decisions (both for what they ingest, as well as how they plan to finance the subsequent healthcare required for bad choices).
We have no freedom if we’re not free to make choices that others regard as “bad” (that hurt no one but ourselves).
> Either we need a nanny state, or we don’t. Pick one and be consistent.
So full blown dictatorship or pure anarchy ? nothing in between...
Sitting 8 hours per day also is very harmful, as is not walking enough, or eating meat, or looking at screen for too long, or drinking alcohol, or exercising too much, driving a car also is risky, walking in the streets too, you could even choke on a peanut so be careful...
What's the end goal ? Matrix like coma pods ? because it probably is the best way to live extra long
>What's the end goal ? Matrix like coma pods ? because it probably is the best way to live extra long
Yes that is what the longtermists have planned for us. 10^58 humans in virtual reality. Now go and donate to the anti rogue AI center and save billions of lives!
"To expand the number of women smokers Hill decided to hire Edward Bernays, who today is known as the father of public relations, to help him recruit women smokers. [...] In 1929 Bernays decided to pay women to smoke their "torches of freedom" as they walked in the Easter Sunday Parade in New York."
"Philip Morris even sponsored a lecture series that taught women the "art of smoking""
The association of smoking with coolness, James Dean, Hollywood stars, it's clear that a lot of people wouldn't smoke "for themselves" if it wasn't for other people manipulating them to do it, for profit.
You have it backwards. The majority wouldn't understand but the nanosecond your banned it they'd know you made things worse for them. See for example gas can spouts.
Furthermore, if you start banning oils I can see industry just doing what the chemical industry does when you ban stuff and using a very similar compound that isn't on the naughty list and might even be worse because it's not as studied so there needs to be some way to be assured that won't happen.
The majority doesn't smoke (anymore - this would have been false 40 years ago and so different results), and so won't care.
Most people have gas cans, but didn't know that they cared about the spouts until a change was made that caused them not to work. People have better things to do than keep track of all the details that congress is doing, and I'm not sure anyone anticipated that the change would result in making gas cans unfit for the purpose of getting gas from a pump the your lawn mower. I can't blame people for being mad about it though, new gas cans either don't work or are very expensive for what is in the end just a container.
My point is that nobody cares about abstract oils but if you make everything in the junk food isle suck compared to last year they'll be pissed off, kinda like they didn't care about gas cans until the government made the spouts a pain in the ass.
It's generally easy to avoid smoke, or at least you're aware of it (in case of someone smoking nearby).
Meanwhile if you eat at a restaurant, takeout, etc, you don't know what they put in your food.
I think it would be fine to allow it in the cases where it's properly and visibly labeled, and ban it otherwise. But it would be hard to inspect all restaurants and so on to check they are following the law.
Being raised knowing in your soul that your generation was chosen to be permanently infantilized by a decaying nanny state is an excellent recipe for a revolutionary cohort.
Listening to a podcast[1] a while ago and the interviewee talked about the pervasiveness of the tobacco industry in our culture. At the risk of misrepresenting him: I think he would probably argue that the tobacco industry has manufactured peoples choice to use cigarettes, and should be reined in. One anecdote that stuck with me was something along the lines of "in the 50s everyone seemed to agree that if smoking caused cancer, it would be banned, and yet here we are now".
A difference I've realized in nutrition: we don't always know what's in what we eat. Whether this is a nanny state move or legit consumer protection from misleading producers isn't as obvious as smoking, where the risks are widely understood and documented directly on the product.
> Either we need a nanny state, or we don’t. Pick one and be consistent.
Why the dichotomy? You give no reason. And whats a nanny state anyway? A state that actually cares for its citizens and wants them to prosper? Somehow I think you have another definition in mind.
I'm forced to inhale all the pollution caused by industrial farming, by people who feel entitled to burn wood for fun, industrial pollution, cars, etc. I'm forced to drink PFAS, micro plastics and a boatload of other toxic chemicals. I need a so-called nanny state to be able to even have a choice of living in a healthy environment, which is nowhere to be found anymore.
Its also smaller things that the so-called free world is forcing on me. Like having to work long days and commute, to be confronted on my way back home by the smell of cheap fast-food that is easily available. An endless amount of kiosks and food stalls are seducing me as I have to walk past them, offering no healthy alternatives, and each office day I have no choice but to battle them. I am a weak man, yes, not a robot. Like many of us there are only so much things I can resist in a single day, especially as I struggle to even get by.
To be fair, you do state that you want people to be able to do bad things for themselves, but penalize them if that affects others.
That makes sense, ethically, but only if A) people are actually fully aware and accountable for the consequences of the 'bad thing' and B) the 'bad things' are side-effect free and/or the people who cause bad side effects for others can be deterred by harsh penalties - which actually only happens if the chance of getting caught is high enough.
I think A and B aren't actually feasible for most things, except some classes of drugs maybe. For A you would need such restrictions that the market will revolt or simply die off. Things like obtaining a license after doing an exam or something like that. As for B, the vast majority of bad things have unavoidable effects on others, and for some the potential for abuse calls for unreasonable policing.
In practice, I think humans function much more as a collective than they like to admit, and individual autonomy is a kind of window dressing of the status quo, rather than anything substantial. Like the fairly trivial choice for product A over product B, where they are nearly the same. But its really hard to choose to work for 3 days and accept less wealth, or something meaningful like that.
Thus, I can't really perceive a lot more freedom in the current neoliberal market than the hypothetical nanny state, especially as this so called free market is full of rules and the consequences of other peoples 'freedoms' are forced upon me.
> In practice, I think humans function much more as a collective than they like to admit, and individual autonomy is a kind of window dressing of the status quo, rather than anything substantial.
Problem is smoking is very obvious what you are doing.
Then you should argue: "Food safety laws should be very limited in it's restriction and it should be up to the consumers to carefully read and study all ingredients to pick what they eat".
> In the US, tobacco use kills 7x as many as the oft-cited opiate “epidemic”, yet you don’t even need a prescription for cigarettes.
The people cigarettes kill are disproportionately older, and they are not killed by any single act of smoking a cigarette, as can happen with opiate overdose, but instead by the cumulative health effects of smoking. That difference is consequential for societies and communities.
Smoking is also more broadly distributed across society, and not nearly as demographically targeted as the opioid situation, debilitating particular types of communities.
A more valid comparison for the opioid situation was the crack situation.
And most folks aren't going to go to a black market to get trans fats - a black market for cigarettes already exists and banning it entirely would only prop it up.
Kraft Dinner pulled off a real marketing coup here: they removed artificial flavors and colors, and some other less popular ingredients, from the recipe for Neon Orange Macaroni Powder, and quietly pushed it out to markets for a few months.
Followed by an advertising blitz along the lines of "Will your kids like the new Mac & Cheese? They've already had it!".
I don’t agree that mandating documentation of the ingredients in the food/medicine products sold commercially really falls under the “nanny state” category.
It’s more just standard consumer protections. Good decisionmaking on the part of the end user has accurate information availability as an essential prerequisite.
It’s not onerous to require sellers document plainly what they are selling.
It is very onerous to tell them “you’re not allowed to sell that”.
Either we need a nanny state, or we don’t. Pick one and be consistent.
Personally I’d prefer the world where we mandate labels and remove all restrictions on sale/distribution/use of chemicals for ingestion, along with HARSH penalties for causing others to ingest your byproducts without consent (ie secondhand smoke). Let adults make their own decisions (both for what they ingest, as well as how they plan to finance the subsequent healthcare required for bad choices).
We have no freedom if we’re not free to make choices that others regard as “bad” (that hurt no one but ourselves).