Many people rationalize and advocate that even perfect strangers should be allowed to control almost every aspect of even normal people's lives: everything from what their health insurance covers, to what school their children attend, to what benefits package they should seek at work, to what lightbulbs they use, to whether they wear masks, even what kind of bag they use for groceries. The list is endless. Such people seem to also want to maximize, rather than minimize, how much of normal people's incomes are controlled by these perfect strangers, called politicians and bureaucrats.Deeper in the thread comes somebody suggesting "Tyler is trolling."
Reason's Ella Lubell doesn't quite go there, although she concludes with a line of argument that could go there: "But there are still thousands of people who could have control over their lives taken away from them by a court through the conservatorship system."
Consider the possible generalizations. For the past year-plus, Our Credentialed Betters have been telling everyone to mask up, stay home, shut up, and have no fun and it's All. For. Your. Own. Good. (No, it wasn't, and it is the Right of the People to ignore those experts.)
There is a vulgar interpretation of "behavioral economics" that interprets the research as "because people don't appear to behave like chalkboard rational agents there are social betterments possible by way of nudges."
Moreover, dear reader, you've surely heard the argument that "Social" "Security" exists because none of us has the self-discipline to set money away for old age and not blow it all on some indulgence, never mind that Congress has been kiting checks against the so-called trust fund for years.
Our Intellectual Betters would like you to imagine June Cleaver, or Father Knows Best. Perhaps if you think about James Spears, or the latter-day incarnation of a chubby buck-toothed middle-schooler we all know as Hillary Clinton, we might be able to resist more actively.
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