Paternalism

This post – and the comment-section – is very interesting. My comments on Robin’s questions in the end:

“Many of you say paternalism is to protect the very stupid. Would you support Would-Have-Banned stores with an min IQ rule? If so, what would that IQ be?”

1. I disagree with the premise that paternalism would indeed succeed in protecting the stupid. Rather, it would tend to make people more stupid (the Spencer quote in the comments), making more paternalism necessary, making more people stupid, ect… How do you get better and more used to evaluate the possible consequenses of your own actions by getting fewer choices? You don’t. Also, it is important to remember that any given ban on products will not make these products unavailable to anyone – all it will do is to increase the costs, as all drug-addicts would be able to tell you. Whether such a cost increase is good or bad is another question entirely, but that one cannot equate the outcome of a ban with an outcome where the banned products will be unavailable is important – there’ll always be tradeoffs.

2. Yes – but only if:

3. 0

To me, this kind of paternalism is just plain elitism. I hate elitism.