Definitely not fully serious, so I'm pleased you questioned it. There was no stupidity on your part and no joke to ruin. I was simply attempting to construct a

Definitely not fully serious, so I'm pleased you questioned it. There was no stupidity on your part and no joke to ruin. I was simply attempting to construct an argument that can be made before somebody else did so. It's not something I agree with, and I suspect few could agree with it as being overall good with the examples I used, but the economic upsides do seem, to first order, to be undoubtedly real. It's really more like an adaptation of the Parable of the Broken Window [0]. The problem is that for each commercial party involved, any fixing of the root cause makes things worse for them and those they employ. In other words, this is an area where pandering to business interests will never fix the root problem, because economic improvement for a host of industries requires people getting worse. Politicians don't generally want to put those that elected them out of work. And yet sometimes the alternative is shortening or worsening the lives of others. The thing is nobody will associate the shortened life expectancy or the worsened state of being with the decision-makers but they will if their action causes the loss of their jobs. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window