Also, the drug access was cut of when the drug dealers decided they were going to cut it off. It wasn't because of Chinese policy of prohibition, that didn't help at all.
The drug dealers always win, that's what you should have learned from the Opium Wars.
Most of the world's meth comes from China, so I guess we're still waiting for their drug access to be cut off.
And yet the society continues on.
All of them as far as I'm aware, The US is responsible for the Single Convention on Narcotics that all nation members of the UN were forced to sign up to so the Mafia would have a global monopoly on the drug market (to replace the market they lost to the 21st Amendment).
The US military is highly involved in maintaining that monopoly.
Where do you think the majority of the worlds drug money ends up?
There's a tendency towards them becoming the biggest army... given that they have a monopoly on a highly demanded commodity... also see the Zeta cartel and who knows how much the mafia have infiltrated your government?
> a strict no resuscitation policy
Why? Are you into eugenics and want to kill them?
Nalaxone is cheap and effective.
Why wouldn't you just send them to the electric chair if you want them dead?
There's nothing inherently personal liberty stripping in opioid addiction, it's only when it is hard to obtain that people will dedicate their entire lives to chasing it that is liberty stripping and this is a result of prohibition.
This was proved in the Swiss harm reduction experiments where they gave the most hardcore heroin addicted criminals unlimited free medical grade heroin of known quantities. The addicts were able to find their own maintenance level dosage and ended up getting jobs and living full lives, all while being addicted to heroin.
The personal liberty stripping effects of opioid addiction you are witnessing are really the personal liberty stripping effects of having an opioid addiction in a prohibitive environment.
Personal liberty means doing what *you* want to do, and if what you want to do is use opioids all day, then it's not the opioids taking away your liberty, it's other people and prohibition.
> Which leads to societal collapse, as observed in China during the Opium Wars.
I thought the main lesson to be learned from the Opium Wars was that prohibition does not work and that the drug dealers always win.
I mean there were two Opium Wars and China lost both of them. They even lost Hong Kong for 99 years because they failed so hard at prohibition.
They should have learned their lesson the first time, and here you are trying to lose your nation to the cartels again.
The average is 9 years.
> They are still working on it, that makes it already better than many other attempts at building a new nuclear power station.
Are you talking about abandoned ones?
There are plenty of abandoned windmill projects, so do windmills take an infinite time to build?
> Why do you think Hinkley Point C is the worst case scenario?
What nuclear projects have taken longer?
The more relevant figures are average time and abandonment rate.
> If you look at the timeline of Hinkley Point C: no, they wouldn't be operational for a couple of years at least.
You can't look at the worst case scenario and present that as the likely outcome.
The point is to transition to a UBI before we're in an unescapable hellscape.
A UBI has been possible ever since we had enough wealth for everyone, there is still plenty of incentive left to work.
> There's a pretty good argument that since the society as a whole ends up bearing the cost of these consequences, then we absolutely should ban or at least discourage such behaviors.
And there are even better arguments against it.
People should pay for the costs of their negative externalities, not for internalities, and not for using services provided because of positive externalities.
> Just that avoiding some high-risk behaviors doesn't mean living a meaningless, boring life.
It really depends on the individual and their built in preferences. For some people a low-risk lifestyle is painfully boring. Others like being boring, it's their choice.
The problem is that boring people think they have a right to add additional costs to those who feel differently.
> Yeah I'm sure a smoker and a drinker will tell you it's enjoyable, but even if it is, personally I don't see any of these as key to having a fun life. Plenty of fun stuff you can do instead.
I think that's the point, for you personally the enjoyment is not worth the harm, but value is subjective, other people might choose differently. No one is stopping you from making that decision, and you shouldn't stop others for deciding the opposite.
People should be informed of the dangers, but ultimately it should be left up to them to decide for themselves if the small amount of enjoyment they gain now is worth the long term suffering they may have to endure later on.
We certainly shouldn't ban these behaviours or put significant extra harms on them life prohibitionary taxes "for their own good".
> building infrastructure that is too costly or not profit-generating, thus it wouldn't ever get built otherwise.
More correctly, subsidies should be used for things that have positive externalities (though there may be other reasons too).
They are called pigovian subsidies.
> and their ability to externalize the costs of the electricity
Electricity doesn't have any intrinsic negative externalities in it, the externality is in the carbon used to make some (most) of it.
It would be better to tax the carbon directly (with a pigovian tax) and redistribute the extra to everyone to cover the increase in prices. The market would then naturally switch to lower carbon sources.
Bitcoin largely doesn't break the assumptions of the free market except for this.
The use of money is all the advantage there is to having money. -- B. Franklin
