6 ms·

There are many hobbies with which people can kill themselves if they don't understand what they are doing. I don't see how brewing is different. A grown-up pers

by dmantis 6mo ago

There are many hobbies with which people can kill themselves if they don't understand what they are doing. I don't see how brewing is different. A grown-up person has rights and bears the consequences of negligence and that's totally normal, that's what freedom is. As long as the product is not sold outside but for personal consumption, it must be legal to make without any certifications.

freedomben 6mo ago
Agree completely, though sadly we are a very long way from this. In a lot of places it is literally illegal and prison-time just for growing certain naturally-occurring plants for purely personal use. I don't see how this ruling helps with that at all though
- franktankbank 6mo ago
  Maybe we are set to see that change at the federal level?
SapporoChris 6mo ago
I forget the exact wording, but the seat belt law are a good example of it. Laws are passed to protect the populace from self harm so that society doesn't suffer from it. It probably doesn't apply here because home distillation is very niche. However, if a bunch of people show up in emergency rooms and it drives up health care costs then expect a quick reversal in policy.
- vladvasiliu 6mo ago
  Right, and I, as someone living in France and paying a hefty part of my income to fund public healthcare, understand that the state would want to limit people doing stupid shit costing the society a fortune in fixing them (though, of course, this just creates a debate on where to draw the line). But isn't the point of non-socialized healthcare, like in the US, that you pay for care out of pocket? Or maybe via your insurance, which will probably increase your premium if you repeatedly engage in stupid actions that need expensive fixing?
  - vkou 6mo ago
    > Or maybe via your insurance, which will probably increase your premium if you repeatedly engage in stupid actions that need expensive fixing? US insurers can only discriminate by age and smoking status.
  - lores 6mo ago
    Society still has paid at least for your education, depends on your working power to at least fund your dependents, and at least on some degree of reasonableness from you not to raise everyone's insurance premiums. There's a line to draw somewhere, but even the most ra-ra-individualist heavily depends on society, and has/should have obligations in turn.
    - functionmouse 6mo ago
      Either pay for my health care or get your nose out of it. If my healthcare is going to be my own private matter, then it should be just that. How insulting.
      - stalfie 6mo ago
        One problem with this mentality is that reality doesn't really make the ideological distinction between whats private and what isn't, or who pays for what. Healthcare is not an intersubjective field, and so actions have consequences, no matter what you think about them. Vaccines are a good example of this, herd immunity is needed for many of them to work. Antibiotic stewardship is another, unregulated usage of antibiotics risks breeding superbugs. More generally, "private" ideas are rarely private. Kids born to idiots practicing alternative medicine often die. This scales to societal effects if you have enough idiots. Even though capitalism makes this very fuzzy, many resources in medicine are in fact finite, meaning that time and money spent on one person might mean that another dies. Sometimes that other person is in another, usually poorer country. COVID vaccine availability illustrated that effect nicely. Essentially what you are advocating is widespread natural selection, with potential consequences affecting anywhere from small local communities to the entire planet in rare cases (COVID is a good one, look up Trichophyton Indotineae for a recent example). And even if you actually do want that, unless you truly follow through, this also comes a huge amount of waste of very limited resources. That is unless you are willing to go the distance and advocate that unvaccinated kids with pneumonia from a measles infection should just go ahead and die because of their parents or neighbors stupid choices. If you take Kants approach to ethics, that you should only act on principles that you would want to become a universal law, then the principle of healthcare being a private matter is a bit of a non-starter, at least by most ethical systems.
- daveidol 6mo ago
  Seat belt laws are an interesting example though because they only apply when driving on public roads. You can drive your car with no seat belt on a private track all day if you want to.
- someothherguyy 6mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternalism
- _heimdall 6mo ago
  There's a whole ball of wax here that boils down to whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist. Its a chicken and egg problem as well, the way we regulate and manage health care and health insurance (at least in the US) allows for costs to pretty easily bleed out to the rest of society. That implies that we must then be collectivist in other policies, though that is counter to many of the original goals of our country and the question is whether we changed those goals or inadvertantly built a system that requires changing gials after the fact. We have a similar problem with immigration laws. Our immigration laws today are completely counter to what they once were, and counter to what is still written on the Statue of Liberty. We have immigration laws now that are necessary because of the welfare programs we implemented, even if we wanted to live up to the older ideals we couldn't without abandoning those welfare programs entirely.
  - yonaguska 6mo ago
    The statue of liberty poem was never a legally binding immigration policy. Not to detract from your point, which I agree with.
    - rayiner 6mo ago
      It was marketing that was installed on the statute of liberty in 1903, when the U.S. was already fully developed. It doesn’t reflect the original intent at all.
      - AlotOfReading 6mo ago
        It was written in 1883, as part of fundraising for the pedestal. It might not reflect precisely the "original intent" of the statue, but it's very much in line with all of the other context.
        rayiner 6mo ago
        The statute of liberty was from a french admirer of the constitution and abolitionist. It was conceived at a time when Napoleon III had declared himself emperor. The connection to immigration was a completely unrelated glomming-on.
- cucumber3732842 6mo ago
  > However, if a bunch of people show up in emergency rooms and it drives up health care costs then expect a quick reversal in policy. How about just don't pay for it? Why is everyone in such a hurry to take people's freedom based on a spreadsheet no less.
- rootusrootus 6mo ago
  I don't like using seat belt laws as an example of preventing people from harming themselves. The most important justification for seat belt laws is ensuring that drivers can maintain control when things get spicy and keep a minor event from escalating into a collision that will harm bystanders. And other innocent people in the same car who will be injured by the unbelted person being thrown around.
deleted 6mo ago
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deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
general1465 6mo ago
Killing yourself is one thing. Killing or crippling potentially many people is negligence terrorism. And you can forget that these guys will keep it for themselves. Purpose of alcohol is to create bonds by sharing it with others. It can go as far as bringing your homemade moonshine on local festivities and poisoning half of the locals without them realizing what has happened until it is too late.
sillyfluke 6mo ago
>There are many hobbies with which people can kill themselves...A grown-up person has rights and bears the consequences of negligence Fyi, the reference to Asia is not about people killing themselves, it's about passing off inadvertantly lethal moonshine as mass-produced drinkable alcohol resulting in the deaths of other people, not yourself.
ninalanyon 6mo ago
Most other hobbies are only significantly dangerous to the practitioner. Distilling on the other hand can easily harm, or even kill, friends, relatives, and casual acquaintances. Brewing is very unlikely to do anyone any harm other than by overconsumption of alcohol.
eru 6mo ago
> I don't see how brewing is different. It's very lucrative to tax brewing and even more distilling.
- LaffertyDev 6mo ago
  You cannot sell homebrew (and presumably won't be able to sell distilled beverages) without a very expensive license. Homebrewers (of all forms) are generally very aware of this when they get into the hobby. Even "cute" forms of recompensation are heavily frowned upon. The most I've seen are to "pay for the glass itself". All that is to say, the government is not harvesting tax from homebrew.
  - eru 6mo ago
    > All that is to say, the government is not harvesting tax from homebrew. And that's part of why it's so heavily restricted.

by dmantis 6mo ago

freedomben 6mo ago

Agree completely, though sadly we are a very long way from this. In a lot of places it is literally illegal and prison-time just for growing certain naturally-occurring plants for purely personal use. I don't see how this ruling helps with that at all though

franktankbank 6mo ago
Maybe we are set to see that change at the federal level?

SapporoChris 6mo ago

I forget the exact wording, but the seat belt law are a good example of it. Laws are passed to protect the populace from self harm so that society doesn't suffer from it. It probably doesn't apply here because home distillation is very niche. However, if a bunch of people show up in emergency rooms and it drives up health care costs then expect a quick reversal in policy.

vladvasiliu 6mo ago
Right, and I, as someone living in France and paying a hefty part of my income to fund public healthcare, understand that the state would want to limit people doing stupid shit costing the society a fortune in fixing them (though, of course, this just creates a debate on where to draw the line). But isn't the point of non-socialized healthcare, like in the US, that you pay for care out of pocket? Or maybe via your insurance, which will probably increase your premium if you repeatedly engage in stupid actions that need expensive fixing?
- vkou 6mo ago
  > Or maybe via your insurance, which will probably increase your premium if you repeatedly engage in stupid actions that need expensive fixing? US insurers can only discriminate by age and smoking status.
- lores 6mo ago
  Society still has paid at least for your education, depends on your working power to at least fund your dependents, and at least on some degree of reasonableness from you not to raise everyone's insurance premiums. There's a line to draw somewhere, but even the most ra-ra-individualist heavily depends on society, and has/should have obligations in turn.
  - functionmouse 6mo ago
    Either pay for my health care or get your nose out of it. If my healthcare is going to be my own private matter, then it should be just that. How insulting.
    - stalfie 6mo ago
      One problem with this mentality is that reality doesn't really make the ideological distinction between whats private and what isn't, or who pays for what. Healthcare is not an intersubjective field, and so actions have consequences, no matter what you think about them. Vaccines are a good example of this, herd immunity is needed for many of them to work. Antibiotic stewardship is another, unregulated usage of antibiotics risks breeding superbugs. More generally, "private" ideas are rarely private. Kids born to idiots practicing alternative medicine often die. This scales to societal effects if you have enough idiots. Even though capitalism makes this very fuzzy, many resources in medicine are in fact finite, meaning that time and money spent on one person might mean that another dies. Sometimes that other person is in another, usually poorer country. COVID vaccine availability illustrated that effect nicely. Essentially what you are advocating is widespread natural selection, with potential consequences affecting anywhere from small local communities to the entire planet in rare cases (COVID is a good one, look up Trichophyton Indotineae for a recent example). And even if you actually do want that, unless you truly follow through, this also comes a huge amount of waste of very limited resources. That is unless you are willing to go the distance and advocate that unvaccinated kids with pneumonia from a measles infection should just go ahead and die because of their parents or neighbors stupid choices. If you take Kants approach to ethics, that you should only act on principles that you would want to become a universal law, then the principle of healthcare being a private matter is a bit of a non-starter, at least by most ethical systems.
daveidol 6mo ago
Seat belt laws are an interesting example though because they only apply when driving on public roads. You can drive your car with no seat belt on a private track all day if you want to.
someothherguyy 6mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternalism
_heimdall 6mo ago
There's a whole ball of wax here that boils down to whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist. Its a chicken and egg problem as well, the way we regulate and manage health care and health insurance (at least in the US) allows for costs to pretty easily bleed out to the rest of society. That implies that we must then be collectivist in other policies, though that is counter to many of the original goals of our country and the question is whether we changed those goals or inadvertantly built a system that requires changing gials after the fact. We have a similar problem with immigration laws. Our immigration laws today are completely counter to what they once were, and counter to what is still written on the Statue of Liberty. We have immigration laws now that are necessary because of the welfare programs we implemented, even if we wanted to live up to the older ideals we couldn't without abandoning those welfare programs entirely.
- yonaguska 6mo ago
  The statue of liberty poem was never a legally binding immigration policy. Not to detract from your point, which I agree with.
  - rayiner 6mo ago
    It was marketing that was installed on the statute of liberty in 1903, when the U.S. was already fully developed. It doesn’t reflect the original intent at all.
    - AlotOfReading 6mo ago
      It was written in 1883, as part of fundraising for the pedestal. It might not reflect precisely the "original intent" of the statue, but it's very much in line with all of the other context.
      - rayiner 6mo ago
        The statute of liberty was from a french admirer of the constitution and abolitionist. It was conceived at a time when Napoleon III had declared himself emperor. The connection to immigration was a completely unrelated glomming-on.
cucumber3732842 6mo ago
> However, if a bunch of people show up in emergency rooms and it drives up health care costs then expect a quick reversal in policy. How about just don't pay for it? Why is everyone in such a hurry to take people's freedom based on a spreadsheet no less.
rootusrootus 6mo ago
I don't like using seat belt laws as an example of preventing people from harming themselves. The most important justification for seat belt laws is ensuring that drivers can maintain control when things get spicy and keep a minor event from escalating into a collision that will harm bystanders. And other innocent people in the same car who will be injured by the unbelted person being thrown around.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

general1465 6mo ago

Killing yourself is one thing. Killing or crippling potentially many people is negligence terrorism. And you can forget that these guys will keep it for themselves. Purpose of alcohol is to create bonds by sharing it with others. It can go as far as bringing your homemade moonshine on local festivities and poisoning half of the locals without them realizing what has happened until it is too late.

sillyfluke 6mo ago

>There are many hobbies with which people can kill themselves...A grown-up person has rights and bears the consequences of negligence Fyi, the reference to Asia is not about people killing themselves, it's about passing off inadvertantly lethal moonshine as mass-produced drinkable alcohol resulting in the deaths of other people, not yourself.

ninalanyon 6mo ago

Most other hobbies are only significantly dangerous to the practitioner. Distilling on the other hand can easily harm, or even kill, friends, relatives, and casual acquaintances. Brewing is very unlikely to do anyone any harm other than by overconsumption of alcohol.

eru 6mo ago

> I don't see how brewing is different. It's very lucrative to tax brewing and even more distilling.

LaffertyDev 6mo ago
You cannot sell homebrew (and presumably won't be able to sell distilled beverages) without a very expensive license. Homebrewers (of all forms) are generally very aware of this when they get into the hobby. Even "cute" forms of recompensation are heavily frowned upon. The most I've seen are to "pay for the glass itself". All that is to say, the government is not harvesting tax from homebrew.
- eru 6mo ago
  > All that is to say, the government is not harvesting tax from homebrew. And that's part of why it's so heavily restricted.