Thread by @KelseyTuoc

Okay I'm sorry but I absolutely despise the 'elite hypocrisy' line here. 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.

https://twitter.com/AltHistoryFan/status/1822492878238564508

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!

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.

Wilcox's hobby horse of course is marriage. The elites marry and stay married, he argues, but they condescendingly tell everyone else that marriage is a neutral choice, resulting in it being abandoned by many who "should have been" told to marry and stay married. But this is completely missing the dynamic here! What upper middle class educated people do is *marry highly eligible upper middle class eligibile people!*

Upper middle class educated people routinely tell their friends who haven't found a suitable spouse to wait and hold out for someone better! Upper middle class educated people absolutely tell a friend whose spouse hits them, contributes nothing to the household, has an addiction, or otherwise is creating a volatile and dangerous home life to divorce!

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. The 'elites' are not condescendingly circulating one message while living by another; often they have the same values and better options which result in different choices.

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.

And so a lot of people who like me have a principled conviction that you generally shouldn't ban things "for your own good" are struggling with how much evidence should change your minds, and how to trade off among different important social goods.

It's a hard question, and people are approaching it in good faith, and there is no hypocrisy in being uncertain about whether paternalism actually helps people because it frequently instead ruins their lives.