[flir]

Heh. This is not the month to be making that argument.

I like having food hygiene standards - it means I don't have to worry about chalk in my bread, arsenic in my sweets, or antibiotics in my beef.

I honestly believe we'd be better off with informational hygiene standards, too. The last two decades have taught me this lesson - free speech absolutism is a giant "kick me" sign on the back of society, and when you find a security hole that big, you patch it.

I recognize there's a balance to be found, and reasonable people will disagree on where the tipping point is.

[Ray20]

>free speech absolutism is a giant "kick me" sign on the back of society

How does this work? What danger represents freedom of speech? With lack of it dangers is understandable: it is a giant "welcome" sign for bloody totalitarian dictatorship.

[danaris]

If megacorporations can lie to you about what they're selling you (which is one of the things that free speech absolutists generally argue for), then you will have no way of knowing if what you buy is going to kill you.

[pdonis]

I don't know any "free speech absolutists" who argue that fraud should be legal. Misrepresentation of a product or service you're selling is fraud. We already have laws against that.

[danaris]

Then consider yourself lucky, but I've seen that position argued strenuously right here on HackerNews in the past.

[rvense]

This has actually been a fairly common position among American libertarians. Alan Greenspan, for instance, was strongly against fraud laws until some time after the financial crisis. The idea was that the market would sort it out.

(And no, I don't understand how this is a serious position that serious people can seriously hold, but then that is how I feel about libertarianism in general.)

[pdonis]

> American libertarians

The term "libertarian" I feel is almost useless as a description of the political views of Americans, because it gets used to describe views that don't make any sense with that label. Greenspan, for instance, often described himself as a libertarian (or "libertarian Republican", whatever that means), but that seems a bit rich for someone who was chairman of one of the most powerful central planning organizations on the planet for so long. If central planning is libertarian then I'm a blue whale.

The term "free market" gets misused just as much. It's not a free market if the government (or the Fed, which is just an arm of the government) has its thumb on the scales.

[flir]

It's the thumb on the scales that allows the free market to exist.

Without it there's just men with guns, and men with more guns.

[rvense]

> It's not a free market if the government... has its thumb on the scales

See, this is why libertarianism doesn't make sense. If there's no government intervention, then monopolies, incumbents, and rich and powerful people in general take their place. The point of having democratic institutions intervene in the market instead is to keep the intervention under control and in check. The alternative is Oliver Twist, ecological disaster, maybe even feudalism.

But we agree that there's a lot of hypocrisy on the Right in general. A lot of insider trading and "I'm a free speech absolutist" and then buying up mass media to censor people who don't agree with you.

[Ray20]

>If megacorporations can lie to you about what they're selling you

But this has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Freedom of speech does not in any way cancel out responsibility for fraud.

[flir]

Then you are not a free speech absolutist, and reasonable people will disagree about where the tipping point is.

Fire in a crowded theatre? CP? Threats of violence? Hate speech?

[pdonis]

> I like having food hygiene standards - it means I don't have to worry about chalk in my bread, arsenic in my sweets, or antibiotics in my beef.

And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned.

Also, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food, I've got some oceanfront property in North Dakota I'd like to sell you. You do know, don't you, that antibiotics in your beef, for example, is done all the time in factory farming with government approval?

[flir]

> prevent all possible bad things

Well that seems like a bad faith interpretation of my argument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1858_Bradford_sweets_poisoning

[pdonis]

You included in your argument at least one bad thing that, as I pointed out, is not only not stopped by government regulation, it's explicitly permitted by it. The fact that there was a bad thing that happened before government regulation, which a government regulation was then passed to try to prevent, doesn't make your argument valid.

[flir]

Which government are we talking about, please?

[altruios]

> And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards

Narrator: "Most humans didn't survive past year five due to preventable illnesses and food born contamination, the humans' ancestor's infant mortality rate was rather high before the age of food safety and soap".

[pdonis]

> Narrator

Of what? Where are you getting this from?

[MyOutfitIsVague]

It's a reference to the Arrested Development television show.

[pdonis]

Last I checked that wasn't a documentary.

[johnnyanmac]

>And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned.

Sure, with reduced life expectancy. If you're fine dying out in your 30's, maybe 40's at best you can eat whatever you want. Your body is pretty resilient to poison short term.

>, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food

Extremist takes aren't doing you a favor here. Like I just said, we can resist a surprising about of poisons short term. Many people indulge in alcohol after all. We have no need to strive for "all bad things" out of our food.

[pdonis]

> with reduced life expectancy.

Most of that was due to high infant mortality. The average person who lived to adulthood did not die in their 30's.