Consumer Choice. Two bottles of soda are pictured, one regular and one diet. Both are poison and contain diabetes and obesity from sugar or sugar substitutes.
Complete guide to a healthy diet:“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” One of the troubles is that people and circumstances vary so much: one person can smoke like a chimney and live to be 95. Another can contract lung cancer from second-hand smoke. One can survive an accident without seatbelt or airbag, another can die in spite of both in an accident not much different. Science can only tell us what the probable effects of something will be on the average person. We are all gambling with our lives and trying to play the odds. But what is true for any one individual has only a slight connection to what is true for the population as a whole, and vice versa. So, should policy makers act to do what it provably better for the population as a whole? Or leave each individual to choose and act according to his own personal degree of education, information, and wisdom, when it is demonstrable that people generally won’t act wisely, and peer pressure often makes them behave worse than if they were left to themselves? Libertarians say, let the weak in body or mind suffer the consequences of their weakness, it shouldn’t be anybody’s business but their own if they eat, drink, and smoke themselves into an early grave. Economists say that high rates of death and disease are a drag on the economy. Communitarians say that we are all in the same boat together and we should work together to help one another live better lives: the welfare of our brothers and sisters is very much our business. Libertarians can be callous, communitarians can be busibodies, and sometimes overreach (see: prohibition). But policy choices do make a difference. Seatbelt, helmet, and other safety laws have made automobiles and motorcycles safer, and tens of thousands of people are alive today who would be dead if the conditions of 1960 still prevailed. But perhaps not being penalized for riding your motorcycle bareheaded is too great a price to pay for those lives?
Complete guide to a healthy diet:“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” One of the troubles is that people and circumstances vary so much: one person can smoke like a chimney and live to be 95. Another can contract lung cancer from second-hand smoke. One can survive an accident without seatbelt or airbag, another can die in spite of both in an accident not much different. Science can only tell us what the probable effects of something will be on the average person. We are all gambling with our lives and trying to play the odds. But what is true for any one individual has only a slight connection to what is true for the population as a whole, and vice versa. So, should policy makers act to do what it provably better for the population as a whole? Or leave each individual to choose and act according to his own personal degree of education, information, and wisdom, when it is demonstrable that people generally won’t act wisely, and peer pressure often makes them behave worse than if they were left to themselves? Libertarians say, let the weak in body or mind suffer the consequences of their weakness, it shouldn’t be anybody’s business but their own if they eat, drink, and smoke themselves into an early grave. Economists say that high rates of death and disease are a drag on the economy. Communitarians say that we are all in the same boat together and we should work together to help one another live better lives: the welfare of our brothers and sisters is very much our business. Libertarians can be callous, communitarians can be busibodies, and sometimes overreach (see: prohibition). But policy choices do make a difference. Seatbelt, helmet, and other safety laws have made automobiles and motorcycles safer, and tens of thousands of people are alive today who would be dead if the conditions of 1960 still prevailed. But perhaps not being penalized for riding your motorcycle bareheaded is too great a price to pay for those lives?