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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   30530 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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"Don't trick people into making decisions they wouldn't make with adequate information and time to reflect", "Don't build a business around looking for suckers and taking them", and "Don't deliberately place harmful addictive products in the stream of commerce" are all very much ideas in the mainstream of the big-picture-liberal tradition despite not being consistent with Nozickian libertarianism. Prohibition was a Progressive cause in the US, and temperance was a Liberal cause in the UK. Conservatives and socialists favoured the brewer-and-publican interest - Churchill (while a Liberal) famously attacked the Tories as the party of, among other things, "The open door at the public house".

Prohibition was a Progressive cause in the US, and temperance was a Liberal cause in the UK

I'll disagree those were on the grounds that you state. Rather on "stop beating your wife", public health and religious considerations. And those were, in fact, defeated by the superior Liberal argument of personal freedom.

I'll concede that there has been a strong Liberal movement for personal empowerment including freedom from such influences in the past. But the contention here is that this has been soundly defeated with Liberals' own arguments. Much like Churchill's support for eugenics was.

"Don't trick people into making decisions they wouldn't make with adequate information and time to reflect"

This is mostly a smokescreen for absolute paternalism; that is, "don't convince people to make decisions that I wouldn't make".

No, because "don't convince people to make decisions that I wouldn't make" is an overly general category that includes not only gambling, but a lot of other things that gambling opponents genuinely don't also want to restrict.

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