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by milkrocks 1924 days ago
Or maybe stop banning things and let people make their own decisions.
3 comments

If drivers were the only ones impacted, I’d agree. For example professional race car drivers have all consented to the risks, so what they do on the race track is up to them. But when cars are used for general transportation there are all kinds of negative externalities that people can’t opt out of.
Other people are always impacted by our decisions. That's just the world we live in. Damn near everything you do affects the people around you in some way.

Do the people around alcoholics consent to that?

At some point the risks/reward of various behaviors (let alone the substances that enable them, you don't see people scrambling to ban belts because people hit their kids with them) are such that legislating away things with varying degrees of state violence to back it up isn't worth the tradeoff.

In the UK 40 people standing on a sidewalk are killed by car drivers every year

In my local town a couple of months ago a car driver managed to embed their car in a house, fortunately the resident was upstairs at the time and not sitting in their living room, otherwise they would have been dead

Last week another driver hit a stone column, 3' from the road (with sidewalk between), damaging a 500 year old building and meaning the residents had to be evacuated. They're still in a hotel.

How do you propose those people make their own decisions?

What about WMDs? Where do you suggest we draw the line?