(2024-08-10) Piper Elite Hypocrisy Gambling

Kelsey Piper on Elite Hypocrisy. No society has ever done more than ours to require poor people to live like the elite do, and this is often really bad for them. We ban cheap housing because it's better for people to live in nicer housing.

We ban (as child neglect, for which the punishment is stochastic 'never seeing your child again') having your upper elementary school aged children walk home from school, let themselves in, and work on their homework until their parents get home. Hire a babysitter! (free range kids)

We waste enormous amounts of money and state power making sure everyone's hairdressers are regulated and their daycare workers all have college degrees. Why? The elites send their kids to fancy preschools, and so they consider it a matter of justice to ban any other kind. (Occupational Licensing)

Brad Wilcox's hobby horse of course is marriage... The women who Wilcox is so concerned with, who he says are receiving elite messaging it's okay not to marry or okay to divorce, are broadly not moving in circles where they have the option of marrying a highly educated highly employable employed upper middle class man. (coming apart)

And this is the context for this argument about how and whether to ban gambling: many people have observed the time after time that paternalistic controlling impulses towards others have made lives worse not better, and arrived at the principled belief that freedom is good.

But of course there are some things-fentanyl, maybe smartphone slot machines - where there's a very very strong social welfare case that the thing should be banned, maybe strong enough to overcome even a strong default that it won't improve peoples' lives to ban things they want.