Food, gambling, etc. are all backed by hordes of brilliant well paid people trying to get you to ruin your life so they make money. On the other side is just regular people like us stressed out trying to survive.
This isn't some "freedom" issue, it's an incredibly huge power asymmetry and I think "we the people" need protection from these forces
> This isn't some "freedom" issue, it's an incredibly huge power asymmetry
ive been fiercely libertarian most of my life but, like you, im starting to realize its just not practical.
libertarianism made sense 100 years ago; you still needed a limited but powerful government to monopoly bust, but the consumer was close enough to the source of all information. smart people could invent products and whole industries from the ground up. you could know whats going on.
this is no longer the case. god help me for the pseudomarxist thing im about to say (and believe), but individual people are helplessly separated from the source; everything is insulated by layers of abstraction. the gift of reduced margin via capitalism and globalisation has cursed us with powerlessness.
how many information wars are you prepared to fight? teflon, ddt, pfoas, bpa, bpb, bps, bpf, bpaf, lead, asbestos, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, psychedelics, birth control, opioids, hormones, climate change, plastic waste, electronic waste, landfilling, recycling, antibiotics, urban planning, housing development, GMO food, monocropping, wastewater, topsoil, algae blooms, overfishing, deforestation, AGI, LLM, ad tech, social media, diet (sugar, cholesterol, fat), msg, processed foods, radiation (cellular, microwave, electromagnetic power lines), conflict minerals, 3rd world labor and global supply chains, slavery (theres 10s of millions of literal slaves in the world, remember?), human trafficking, israel and palestine, north korea, china, Uyghurs, russia and ukraine, ongoing gender apartheid in parts of the middle east, war torn africa, local state and federal politics.
plus the hundreds i didnt think of and the thousands i dont know i need to care about.