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Originally Posted by Renton
There's a difference between teaching someone that they shouldn't do something and using the threat of death to make them not do something. A father can forbid his son to do something because the son is under the father's care and support. At the very least, father's house - father's rules must be followed. Using the parent and dependent child analogy to describe the state's relationship to its citizens is kind of gross. It doesn't fit anyway because with your parents you eventually become emancipated from them to live your own adult life and make your own adult choices. The nanny state holds you in the pen from the cradle to the grave.
Why? I otherwise agree with the premise. I wasn't using it as an analogy and don't know why you took it that way, I was merely giving situations where one entity maybe can forbid another from taking risks.
Of course not. But I think the state has a way of delaying or preventing the lessons from being learned. The consequences for the mistakes are blunted or even misdirected so they seem to come from different causes and affect different people. A clear example of this is the state debt. The overspending is a huge mistake and the consequences are being delayed decades so that people who are in an entirely different generation will have to pay the consequences.
I think the lessons are particularly difficult to learn but they are learned through gov't in some form. How else could you explain the Constitution if not capable men tasked with devising a robust system of gov't and learning from the lessons of the past?
I think your expectation of how quickly all things can be improved is warped by how quickly some things can be improved - like microwaves and telegraphs.
Maybe it's not a miracle cure. It was certainly a powerful weapon that was made politically inconvenient to use. Mozambique, Belize, and Bolivia were all pressured to stop using it or otherwise lose their aid grants.
And why were they pressured to stop their use? Clearly the price point was desirable, but something else stopped them. Why would something else stop them? I hope you take some time to give the other side an honest chance, because it seems clear to me that DDT had a definitive impact on the environment that wasn't being captured in the market-price.
Admittedly, it isn't possible to know the extent of the harm caused by the ban, or indeed even if there was great harm caused at all. Either way, it is clear that the preferences of white people in the U.S. and Europe were imposed upon much poorer and more desperate people in the third world. Rich people can afford to be risk-averse. Poor people don't have that luxury.
Because the white people used it first, before its true costs became apparent. Then when it's true costs were known, the approach to its use changed with new information.
The drawbacks weren't known and dangerous. They were only speculative. If you read the context of the ban, it's pretty obvious that it was more political than scientific. Rachel Carson's book, which has since been widely discredited, set off the environmental movement and a wave of hysteria that led eventually to the ban. There's really not much evidence to suggest that any humans died from exposure to it, and many of the threats to wildlife have been discredited as well. The current opinions have settled into, mainly, people who think the chemical is worth using to preserve human life and people who think it shouldn't be, primarily due to threat to wildlife. It's really only the crackpots who are continuing to argue that it's a threat to human beings.
If you read the context of the ban, she interviewed scientists all over the place and brought a wealth of information to bear in her book. You package that up as sensational claptrap and another examples of the failing of gov't policy.
There are better examples for you to go to - like the gov't push for Positive Train Control in response a couple of sensationalized accidents. Proper control systems are comparatively very cheap and very nearly just as good, but Positive Train Control does absolutely everything and so the gov't pushes for it because the emotions of the nation demanded it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_S...nt_Act_of_2008
Yeah in the hour it takes to research it to the 80% level to be aware-but-not-expert, it just seems to be mildly hurtful to humans and environments. Again, probably not a panacea to cure malaria and no drawbacks at all, but a clear example of politics costing human lives.
How do you know you're 80% aware? You see a small problem here where I see a big one. I don't think I'm close to 80% aware. The stuff lasts for a long time and accumulates upwards in the environment, what the long term consequences are are difficult to tell. How can you claim that you're close to 80% aware? Certainly it's not persuasive enough to stop someone from buying it and using it when faced with the obvious problem of malaria, but the consequences of its use are still well out of reach for almost everyone.
No, DDT was developed privately in 1874, long before the wars. Its insecticidal properties were discovered by a private pharmaceutical company that still exists today. The chemist got a Nobel prize for that. Certainly, it was put into practice by militaries during WWII, though.
But let's say a state did create it. Of course, that's going to happen from time to time since the state has tons of resources and human ingenuity at its disposal. There are a lot of things that the state does that prevents the private sector from participating entirely. Or the state throws so many resources at the thing that no private company could hope to compete.
Fair enough. Was their any use of it prior to the army purposing it?
Yeah, again, it was free market. As for your second point, that just seems absurd. Sick people have able family and friends who want to make them well, who will work to get the money for the medicine and treatment to make them well.
Life has a funny way of being pretty absurd. See the post I just made.
You're kind of proving my point. Why do you think a committee would be any better at knowing what the true consequences of DDT use are? It's just a few appointed people. The free market is 7 billion people. As I said the other day, the only way to know if the benefits exceed the costs is to allow people the choice whether to use it or not. Each person has a unique set of needs and desires. A unique tolerance for risk. Let them make the call how they use their own property (including their bodies).
Get a few capable people to really bash out the problem, provided with time and all the information available and they'll make a better decision that 7 billion people acting through a price-point mechanism every time.
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