The Progressive ideal, which started as only a faint glimmer in the US at the turn on the 20th Century, has grown to dominate our social mores over the past 50 years. For most people reading HN, it's all they have ever known. But there is a serious cost. We infatilize our adults and produce generations of new citizens paralyzed by anxiety and (to a large extent) incapable of tolerating the faintest hint of discouragement.
But at least fewer of them slip through the cracks.
"prosperity required permitting unregulated sale of fentanyl!"... sounds nonsensical, because it is.
> We infatilize our adults and produce generations of new citizens paralyzed by anxiety and (to a large extent) incapable of tolerating the faintest hint of discouragement.
I played poker professionally for seven years. I've seen the full gamut of responses to gambling on the human brain. Gambling absolutely hijacks the neurocomputational circuitry of some people in a way that it doesn't others. Infantilized? I managed my risk of ruin carefully and rationally, others didn't. They invariably got ruined. Period. Those people should not be gambling. There was no safety net, which you falsely imagine exists. I wish there had been. The consequences to their lives outweighed, by far, the prosperity gained by permitting large-scale high-stakes gambling (which is at best a zero-sum game if the house is included). I do not think my former profession should be openly legal to everyone. Participating in it was an act of willful evil on my part. I am glad to have it regulated, for the sake of the families of the people whose lives I helped destroy.
There was absolutely nothing and nobody "infantilizing" me to induce "anxiety". There was a largely unregulated free-for-all into a brutal, unforgiving world, in which you can lose a fortune in the blink of an eye if you elect to wager it and lose. Sure, I thrived in that environment, but it was at the expense of vulnerable individuals.
Seriously, what the actual fuck are you talking about. If you'd ever taken actual, life-altering financial risks in a society without a real financial safety net (the United States), you'd know that there is absolutely nothing between a foolish series of decisions while drunk (or much worse, in the thrall of a persistent gambling addiction) and complete financial ruin.
We can do better as a society, and we should.
While we're at it, gosh, you know what would have improved the poker economy? Unregulated firearms at poker tables. Hell, let's just make homicide legal if the other person bets their life. Or maybe even if they don't! That would have really let us demonstrate our fully-enfranchised individual wills to power. No one would be confused as an anxious man baby! We could have thrived like real manly men! Letting people blow each other's heads off at a whim during a gambling free-for-all ("between consenting adults!") would surely improve prosperity. Great idea! Agreeing as a democratic society to regulate that behavior would only produce a society of emasculated degenerates incapable of expressing the full range of the human spirit! Think of the sacrificed business opportunities! /s.
It's not "individuals slipping through the cracks of society", it's society and the people who run it consuming people (or animals) as fuel. Progressive politics might only be as old as the Roosevelts but they have surprisingly deep historical roots[0].
The improvement in material conditions from, say, the 1500s to 2024 is a function of changes in the law that made it worthwhile to produce those improvements. Or, in other words, nobody is going to innovate in phone apps when they have to give 30% to Apple and Google. Back then, the "30%" would have been indentured servitude, debtors prisons, and so on. Innovation increased when serfdom ended and more people were able to innovate.
Innovation in an economy is a function of how many people have access to appropriate levels of capital. Which is itself a function of the distribution of wealth. An economy in which five people own everything is one where nobody can innovate outside of that system. An economy with redistributive effects - whether that be through government action or otherwise - is more productive at the expense of the growth prospects of the ultra-wealthy. Economies built to make one participant fatter are eating their seed corn.
I have no clue what you're going on about with infantilization. That seems like something downstream of several social trends.
[0] e.g. western feminism is older than the Declaration of Independence; abolitionism is at least as old as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lay