4 ms·

This makes me wonder, in democracies there are stuff you simply cannot ban. What is the solution?

by yard2010 1y ago

tonyedgecombe 1y ago
Tax.
rightbyte 1y ago
You can bann cigarettes for 18yo and under and then increase the age limit once a year by a year. You really have to force it to get hooked on tobacco. Dunno how many would bother without convenient access.
eru 1y ago
Just tax them. Countries are already doing that. Why do we need to ban them? If people want to smoke them, let them. The tax can take care of externalities. (And I say that as someone who hates smoking.)
- Rodeoclash 1y ago
  Australia has taxed cigarettes so much that a thriving black market has started that nobody seems interested in policing. Alcohol appears to be going in the same direction.
  - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
    Easy, don't tax so much that it becomes ineffective. There is a sweet spot to find. Honestly, I dislike smoking as much as anyone else but I frankly oppose the way Australia is taxing cigarettes and alcohol. These are sin taxes. They are high to deter people from doing things they want to do. That's overreach. Taxes should aim to cover externalities. That's fair. Your choice forces a burden on the collectivity which it's trying to recoup. Above that, that's just coercion and paternalism. Plus it disproportionally affects the poor but I guess the moral police pushing for this kind of taxes sees that as a benefit.
    - philipallstar 1y ago
      If your citizens are hooked on an addictive product, you can jack up the taxes.
      - eru 1y ago
        Please check the earlier posts in the discussion you are commenting on. Even if you have the most addictive substance on the planet, the black market puts an upper bound on how much you can tax it.
        philipallstar 1y ago
        I'm not saying it doesn't. I'm saying the motivation isn't moral.
        eru 1y ago
        Have a look at the earlier discussion. Plenty of people have moral motivations, hence the call for banning, rather than taxing. Moral in this case means: "I know better what's good for poor people than they do".
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      >Easy, don't tax so much that it becomes ineffective. There is a sweet spot to find. The taxation level that maximizes revenue or minimizes harmful noncompliance never satisfies the moralizing people who wanted the thing you're discussing (whatever it is) punitively taxed in the first place.
- AngryData 1y ago
  The externalities of smoking is cheaper healthcare because most smokers die of heart attack and stroke right around retirement age.
  - eru 1y ago
    There's lots of different externalities. Eg smoking also produces smelly smoke. Externalities also depend on context. Eg your example of cheaper healthcare only works when healthcare is priced by pooling payments. If you have a system where an actuary looks at each case individually (well, a system designed by an actuary does) and assigns a premium, then it doesn't matter what other people are doing: you are paying for your own risk (and competition between insurance providers keeps the system honest). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize_indemnity_insurance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize_indemnity_insurance for a corner of that insurance market that works on the latter system. Even if you insist on pooling, you could pool smokers and non-smokers separately. Granted in many places regulations force health insurance providers to do the naive pooling where your statement can be true. Similar, or even more so, for pensions.
beeflet 1y ago
lace 1/100 (or some other number, 1/1000?) cigarettes with a lethal dose of cyanide
Gareth321 1y ago
Restriction of rights is a spectrum. For example, we know that driving cars carries some (very small) risk. If we banned driving, fewer people would die (from car related accidents). This must be balanced against individual rights and social outcomes. If we banned cars, how many people would lose their jobs? How many people would be unable to get to hospital? It's like that banning cars would cause more harm than lives it saves. This is an extreme scenario to illustrate not all bad things should be banned. Smoking is more nuanced. For the most part (as long as public spaces and spaces with children are appropriately regulated), smokers hurt only themselves. In countries with public healthcare, this can increase care costs, but most studies now find that because smokers die much younger, their combined lifetime costs are actually lower. Old people are very expensive to care for. So the question becomes: to what degree do we want the state preventing people from hurting themselves? Where does that authority end? Alcohol? Sugar? Fatty foods? Less than eight hours of sleep? Not exercising? Too much TV and iPad? Social media? Not reading enough books? This is, IMHO, a slippery slope. For reasons of ideology and pragmatism, I do not support regulation for "victimless" activities, unless there are significant social costs/harm. This means I support legal tobacco, marijuana, MDMA, alcohol, and and many other drugs. I also support the right to partake in extreme sports, eating junk food and sugar, and not exercising. The implications of this particular study are very difficult to morally and legally navigate. If smoking while young can make children age slightly faster, surely there is a moral imperative to prevent those who are 15 and younger from smoking? I believe that is the case in most of the West already. However we also know that parents who don't exercise and eat poorly also tend to pass along these habits to their children. Should we also ban parents from eating at McDonalds?
rsynnott 1y ago
Generally, you discourage them with taxes or other restrictions. Most developed countries have very high taxes, and various legal restrictions, on tobacco, say. Many have high taxes on sugar. There aren't really _that_ many things which fall into the "clearly harmful, but people won't give them up" category; tobacco, alcohol, sugar, maybe meat (this one can be, and has been incessantly, argued both ways to an extent), would be the big ones.

This makes me wonder, in democracies there are stuff you simply cannot ban. What is the solution?

Tax.

You can bann cigarettes for 18yo and under and then increase the age limit once a year by a year. You really have to force it to get hooked on tobacco. Dunno how many would bother without convenient access.

eru 1y ago

Just tax them. Countries are already doing that. Why do we need to ban them? If people want to smoke them, let them. The tax can take care of externalities. (And I say that as someone who hates smoking.)

Rodeoclash 1y ago
Australia has taxed cigarettes so much that a thriving black market has started that nobody seems interested in policing. Alcohol appears to be going in the same direction.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  Easy, don't tax so much that it becomes ineffective. There is a sweet spot to find. Honestly, I dislike smoking as much as anyone else but I frankly oppose the way Australia is taxing cigarettes and alcohol. These are sin taxes. They are high to deter people from doing things they want to do. That's overreach. Taxes should aim to cover externalities. That's fair. Your choice forces a burden on the collectivity which it's trying to recoup. Above that, that's just coercion and paternalism. Plus it disproportionally affects the poor but I guess the moral police pushing for this kind of taxes sees that as a benefit.
  - philipallstar 1y ago
    If your citizens are hooked on an addictive product, you can jack up the taxes.
    - eru 1y ago
      Please check the earlier posts in the discussion you are commenting on. Even if you have the most addictive substance on the planet, the black market puts an upper bound on how much you can tax it.
      - philipallstar 1y ago
        I'm not saying it doesn't. I'm saying the motivation isn't moral.
        eru 1y ago
        Have a look at the earlier discussion. Plenty of people have moral motivations, hence the call for banning, rather than taxing. Moral in this case means: "I know better what's good for poor people than they do".
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    >Easy, don't tax so much that it becomes ineffective. There is a sweet spot to find. The taxation level that maximizes revenue or minimizes harmful noncompliance never satisfies the moralizing people who wanted the thing you're discussing (whatever it is) punitively taxed in the first place.
AngryData 1y ago
The externalities of smoking is cheaper healthcare because most smokers die of heart attack and stroke right around retirement age.
- eru 1y ago
  There's lots of different externalities. Eg smoking also produces smelly smoke. Externalities also depend on context. Eg your example of cheaper healthcare only works when healthcare is priced by pooling payments. If you have a system where an actuary looks at each case individually (well, a system designed by an actuary does) and assigns a premium, then it doesn't matter what other people are doing: you are paying for your own risk (and competition between insurance providers keeps the system honest). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize_indemnity_insurance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize_indemnity_insurance for a corner of that insurance market that works on the latter system. Even if you insist on pooling, you could pool smokers and non-smokers separately. Granted in many places regulations force health insurance providers to do the naive pooling where your statement can be true. Similar, or even more so, for pensions.

beeflet 1y ago

lace 1/100 (or some other number, 1/1000?) cigarettes with a lethal dose of cyanide

Gareth321 1y ago

Restriction of rights is a spectrum. For example, we know that driving cars carries some (very small) risk. If we banned driving, fewer people would die (from car related accidents). This must be balanced against individual rights and social outcomes. If we banned cars, how many people would lose their jobs? How many people would be unable to get to hospital? It's like that banning cars would cause more harm than lives it saves. This is an extreme scenario to illustrate not all bad things should be banned. Smoking is more nuanced. For the most part (as long as public spaces and spaces with children are appropriately regulated), smokers hurt only themselves. In countries with public healthcare, this can increase care costs, but most studies now find that because smokers die much younger, their combined lifetime costs are actually lower. Old people are very expensive to care for. So the question becomes: to what degree do we want the state preventing people from hurting themselves? Where does that authority end? Alcohol? Sugar? Fatty foods? Less than eight hours of sleep? Not exercising? Too much TV and iPad? Social media? Not reading enough books? This is, IMHO, a slippery slope. For reasons of ideology and pragmatism, I do not support regulation for "victimless" activities, unless there are significant social costs/harm. This means I support legal tobacco, marijuana, MDMA, alcohol, and and many other drugs. I also support the right to partake in extreme sports, eating junk food and sugar, and not exercising. The implications of this particular study are very difficult to morally and legally navigate. If smoking while young can make children age slightly faster, surely there is a moral imperative to prevent those who are 15 and younger from smoking? I believe that is the case in most of the West already. However we also know that parents who don't exercise and eat poorly also tend to pass along these habits to their children. Should we also ban parents from eating at McDonalds?

rsynnott 1y ago

Generally, you discourage them with taxes or other restrictions. Most developed countries have very high taxes, and various legal restrictions, on tobacco, say. Many have high taxes on sugar. There aren't really _that_ many things which fall into the "clearly harmful, but people won't give them up" category; tobacco, alcohol, sugar, maybe meat (this one can be, and has been incessantly, argued both ways to an extent), would be the big ones.