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> education > regulation Not really. There's always going to be a significant fraction of the public that will be irresponsible, either through ignorance, int

> education > regulation Not really. There's always going to be a significant fraction of the public that will be irresponsible, either through ignorance, intransigence, or greed. And then there's the fact that the amount personal education and effort required to substitute for regulation in the modern world is so high to be entirely impractical (sure you could reasonably take up one or two areas, but not all areas).

edmcnulty101 5y ago
Yes agreed. However, a free society is not about mandating people to be safe, it's about providing the information and allowing them to make their own decisions. Smoking is the perfect example of this and a great example of how the government should act. Don't regulate but educate people on the harms and allow them to make their own decisions. Marijuana is the perfect example of how the federal gov't got 'mandates' wrong, and only by breaking the law have people changed it.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > However, a free society is not about mandating people to be safe, it's about providing the information and allowing them to make their own decisions. I don't think it's that simple, and I think presenting things as a binary like this leads false choices. I think the right way to think about it is more along the lines of optimizing the choices so people can make good ones with a reasonable amount of total effort. And there we're really only talking about decisions whose impact is limited to the individual making them. When there are externalities involved that's a different thing. > Don't regulate but educate people on the harms and allow them to make their own decisions. While that sounds reasonable in the abstract, I don't think it meets my criteria above, because the amount of education required quickly becomes far more than any individual can reasonably juggle with other responsibilities, and then there's the question of how much time most people actually want to spend on stuff like that.
- dekhn 5y ago
  No. What you are describing (not mandating, just providing information) is known as "libertarian anarchy". A "free society" still places constraints on people in the form of public health policy, if and when the risk of not doing it greatly exceeds the risk of doing it. I do agree that marijuana represents a situation where the government failed to make a legitimate public health case, and now has to undo decades of policy.

edmcnulty101 5y ago

Yes agreed. However, a free society is not about mandating people to be safe, it's about providing the information and allowing them to make their own decisions. Smoking is the perfect example of this and a great example of how the government should act. Don't regulate but educate people on the harms and allow them to make their own decisions. Marijuana is the perfect example of how the federal gov't got 'mandates' wrong, and only by breaking the law have people changed it.

tablespoon 5y ago
> However, a free society is not about mandating people to be safe, it's about providing the information and allowing them to make their own decisions. I don't think it's that simple, and I think presenting things as a binary like this leads false choices. I think the right way to think about it is more along the lines of optimizing the choices so people can make good ones with a reasonable amount of total effort. And there we're really only talking about decisions whose impact is limited to the individual making them. When there are externalities involved that's a different thing. > Don't regulate but educate people on the harms and allow them to make their own decisions. While that sounds reasonable in the abstract, I don't think it meets my criteria above, because the amount of education required quickly becomes far more than any individual can reasonably juggle with other responsibilities, and then there's the question of how much time most people actually want to spend on stuff like that.
dekhn 5y ago
No. What you are describing (not mandating, just providing information) is known as "libertarian anarchy". A "free society" still places constraints on people in the form of public health policy, if and when the risk of not doing it greatly exceeds the risk of doing it. I do agree that marijuana represents a situation where the government failed to make a legitimate public health case, and now has to undo decades of policy.