I'm really not sure I see a difference, if you're going to start from the absolutist position that the state needs to butt out.
Either way, bans or forcing provision for retirement etc, you're taking the position that someone else does know best, and that they need protecting from their own spending behaviour. After that it's just a matter of degree.
My position is that there should be no social safety net provided at the taxpayer's expense. If one is going to argue that we ought to provide a safety net, and ought to limit people's right to decide how to live their own life to prevent this safety net from being unduly burdened, then I would respond that even if one were to accept that assumption, a less disruptive way of meeting this goal would be with a forced saving mandate, rather than trying to prevent them from bankrupting themselves in a roundabout way, through laws that prevent spending on allegedly frivolous/addictive ends.
But of course I don't accept their underlying argument at all. Just making the point that even if one did, their solution is not optimal.
Personally I don't want to live in a society without a safety net, or the other niceties of a modern civil society.
I also don't really consider it a trade-off - regardless of a social safety net, we ought to be restricting borderline scams. A lot of people aren't very smart, or are only smart in very specific directions. And they don't know they're not that smart. They can be taken in, scammed and fleeced, and this creates a problem not just for them but for lots of others too. This is why we restrict things like pyramid schemes.
I would love voluntary safety nets. I just don't like compulsory ones paid for at the taxpayers expense. It reduces choice, breeds corruption and unaccountability, and does not offer people the option to opt-out. But this is not really the forum to debate that, as it can get quite detailed.
As for those not capable of fending for themselves in a free market: maybe it would be a better idea to have a new class of citizen that, after passing a rationality test, is allowed to buy/invest-in whatever they want, while making the rest of the population in some sense wards of the state, with safety guards on their smartphones and PCs, and a state-appointed counseler greenlighting all of their financial transactions, or at least all of the entities they are allowed to transact with.
As for token sales, you can't categorise them all as borderline scams. It depends on the token sale.
I don't think voluntary safety nets work - it's precisely the people who wouldn't pay into one that are most in need of doing so.
Almost all citizens are badly informed and easily taken in by one thing or other. We look after each other in various ways. Civil safety nets and criminal law are part of those.
>> As for token sales, you can't categorise them all as borderline scams. It depends on the token sale.
Indeed, and many of them are without substance, riding the wave of interest in ICO tokens, and are borderline scams. I did not say all are, but enough that regulation in this space is more or less inevitable, and will be warmly welcomed by many.
There are a f*ckton of laws around IPOs and share trading, for good reasons.
I don't like the idea of a safety net that depends mostly on the contributions of those who least want to be party to it.
Regarding looking out for each other with bans on dangerous goods/services, I have no problem with a voluntary program that people enroll in to be looked after in this manner. We could have a state-backed coop that we voluntarily cede some of our rights to for a predetermined amount of time (e.g. 5 years), and over that timeframe, we are obliged to use the government's software guards on our smartphones/PCs, that prevents us from transacting with entities not on the government's whitelist.
But people should be able to live without those protections if they so choose. Accepting anything otherwise is accepting a servile existence for oneself and everyone else.
>> I don't like the idea of a safety net that depends mostly on the contributions of those who least want to be party to it.
Yet without such things we end up with millions in penury, risking starvation, because they never thought they'd be the one to hit hard times.
As for the rest, yes I get that you're a libertarian. I'm not. I understand its appeal, but it's a recipe for literal social darwinism, with those who are poor, unlucky or ill getting to die, free, in the streets.
Perhaps you could create a thread in an appropriate forum and we could debate the issue, because I don't agree at all that absent pillaging the rich with redistributive taxes, we'd see a worsening of poverty.
And even if we could save the poor with such acts, it seems like a very shortsighted approach that can't possibly be sustained over any significant timescale, given it depends on ignoring the will of an entire segment of the population. What kind of society could we possibly hope to create with such an adversarial approach?
