Certainly, they should be able to say these things. They should not necessarily expect that their views will be implemented.
No, that person clearly has an uninformed opinion - which in a free society he should still be allowed to express.
An interesting example. Given that there’s nothing directly unhealthy about unfluoridated water, I’d say on balance it’s better to allow people their say, even when you have evidence that your alternative is superior. I’m reminded of a quote from the movie Gandhi, which I recall (no doubt imperfectly) as follows: “Like people everywhere, we prefer a bad government of our own devising to a government imposed on us, no matter how good.”
There is an assumption behind the statement ‘They are voting against their best interest’ that I don’t believe is true.
That assumption is that the persons philosophy doesn’t enter into the equation.
Let me 'splain.
Let us say the ‘Give Slee 1% of your earnings’ law was up for a vote (We will pretend for a moment that this is a direct vote by citizens on the law itself, not through congress/the prez/etc). Since, in real life, everyone agrees that Slee is a wonderful person, the law has a high chance of passing.
Would I, Slee, vote for this? No. The reason is that it goes against my beliefs on what a fair and just government should do.
Would voting against such a law be against my best interest? Certainly.
The point of the little hypothetical above is that, for many people, the ideal does matter. Some people (not enough in my opinion) actually stand by what they believe even if it has a negative impact on their life.
The language of these kind of questions messes up the discussion. Using “best” implies ideals and ideals are always impossible to achieve and therefore its use sort of kills the argument.
But if you talk about “better” and such, then there’s a lot of room. Especially when you recognize that there are many “betters” possible, with people have different value systems as to what “better” means.
So, I think in terms of people who are not well informed, are easily conned, etc., who make decisions that are poorer than other options. There are numerous examples of such bad decision making we see all the time, from the personal to the national levels.
So, the problem unquestionably exists. The real issue is what to do about it?
Inform people better? As far as I can tell, making it easier for people to find correct information allows them to find far more incorrect information via those same channels.
Instruct people on how to detect cons, lies, etc.? People are astonishingly resistant to believing from someone else that they have been conned despite overwhelming evidence. E.g., lots of stories out there about people continuing to pay Nigerian scammers despite relatives have police sit down and talk with them and showing them the exact same emails sent to other people.
That doesn’t mean we give up. But it also means that we stay realistic.
And in particular, avoid loaded language like “best”.
I vote Pro-Choice, even though abortion will never be an issue in my personal life. I vote for penal reform, even though I am not and have never been in prison. I vote for gay rights, even though I am straight. I vote for social assistance, even though I have enough to live on for the rest of my life. I vote for amnesty for illegal aliens, even though I am born in USA. I vote for recreational drug decriminalization, even though I have never used any drugs. I vote for beer sales on Sunday, even though I do not drink. I vote for the second amendment, even though I have not touched a gun in 60 years. I vote for freedom of religion, even though I am not a Muslim (nor a Christian). I vote for universal single-payer health care, even though I am exceptionally healthy.
Common decency compels me to vote for the commonweal, even though my own personal lifestyle is not in jeopardy of being abridged. Other are, and that is intolerable to me as a citizen of an enlightened republic…
We are social creatures and our own individual lives cannot be (much) better than the society in which we’re embedded. Great wealth may be enough to buy great isolation from larger society. But ultimately even that proves insufficient when surrounded by a badly enough degraded commonweal.
One of the dubious triumphs of consumer-centric economic thinking over civic / social thinking is a deep and abiding selfishness that refuses to consider the consequences to each of us from others acting with the same selfishness we arrogate unto ourselves.
I understand the argument you’re making but I don’t think it applies in many cases.
I think many times when voters vote against their self-interest, it’s not because they’ve thought the issue over and come to the conclusion that the overall good of the nation is more important than their own personal situation. I think in many cases, it’s because people don’t understand what they’re voting on.
For example, Donald Trump has explained his proposed tax plan. One aspect of it is to raise the lowest income tax rate from 10% to 12%. If this is enacted, some of the people who voted for Trump are going to have their taxes raised.
Now you can argue the merits of Trump’s tax plan but that’s a side-issue. My point here is that I’m certain that some of those people who voted for Trump did so in the belief that he would lower their taxes. These people had a goal (“get my taxes lowered”) but they chose the wrong path to that goal (“vote for the guy who has said he will raise my taxes”). I can’t see any way you can frame this so that these people were voting in their own interest or doing what was best for them. Even if Trump’s tax plan is a good idea, these people weren’t voting for Trump on that basis. These people just screwed up.
I just posted this in GD _ story about poor woman in E KY (Appalachia) “worried sick” about losing her “health insurance”.
Before 2013, she had no insurance, What she has was because KY had a Dem Governor in 2013 when ACA expanded Medicaid to include, among others, her little hell-hole.
In 2014, KY elected a GOP Governor who, quite predictably, petitioned to scrap the Medicaid expansion.
Trump campaigned on “Repeal Obamacare”.
Appalachia voted solid RED, RED, REDDER. KY had one blue county; WV had none.
But it’s OK, because he’s going to “Bring back coal. 100%”.
1/3 of KY’s population smokes; the entire area is a coronary lightening rod.
I doubt that many of them could even survive in a mine, let alone do any work there
Fluoridation of the water supply does have benefits, it also appears to have some important drawbacks:
And
So, who makes the call whether healthier teeth are more important to society at large than a few IQ points? Fluoridation of water in the US has been around for 50+ years, why haven’t any neurological impact studies been done here? Because the ‘experts’ had no idea it could be an issue, mostly because it wasn’t the problem being solved for then. Cavities were. It seemed like the thing to do at the time. Now, maybe not so much.
Things are rarely so cut-and-dry as we like to make them. Is it really so surprising that, given the complexities involved, that neither Joe Blow nor the ‘experts’ necessarily know what’s “in his best interest”?
The desired results of the policy. For instance on global warming it is the job of the climate scientists to study what global warming’s effects will be and what can be done to ameliorate the situation. However, that is only the first part of the process. It is then up to the public at large to consider the effects and the costs of preventing them and make a decision about whether the tradeoffs are worth it. Each individual has their own preferences and a climate scientist has no better knowledge of whether the trade offs are worth it then your average person.
This is a fine model for selecting color of icing on a birthday cake*; it falls apart when the effect of one person can cancel the desired effects of others.
You do not get to burn tires in the center of a city full of people who choose not to have to deal with the problems of burning tires.
OK and TX may well think fracking is wonderful because it brings them money.
More likely, some parts of those states think it wonderful - the people who get the land subsistence, the earthquakes, the drinking water polluted with drilling fluid may well NOT think it wonderful.
But - that County may well forbid fracking, Fat lot that’s going to do them.
“Birthday cake” already assumes:
There is a birthday
You wish to mark/celebrate this event
You are comfortable with cake, knowing its cost, shelf life concerns, caloric and dietary profile.
We are broken into two groups - co-operators and nomads, with conflicting agendas.
Either the co-operators decide to do away with the nomads, or the nomads get together to do away with the co-operators; but nomads getting together makes them a type of co-operator…hmmm…
Some people (not any Doper in this thread) exhibit a rather tortured logic when they say, “Person X knows what’s best for Person X because it’s Person X’s wellbeing at stake,” but then later say something to the effect of, “Person X does **not **know what’s best for him/her, because he or she is emotionally invested in the situation at hand and cannot back out and see the bigger picture. A 3rd party sees the situation much more clearly than the parties involved.”
I think the divide here seems to be between two kinds of knowledge. There’s moral knowledge, which tells you things like what’s moral and what’s immoral. And there’s factual knowledge, which tells things like what’s accurate and what’s inaccurate.
I intentionally avoiding using the words right and wrong because they get applied to both types of knowledge even though I feel they have different meanings in those applications. A person who believes they’re right in thinking abortions should be illegal is different than a person who believes they’re right in thinking Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This first is a matter of opinion and you can disagree with an opinion but you can’t say it’s factually wrong. But the second is a matter of fact and it’s easy to be objectively wrong on factual matters.
People are often best placed to judge their own interests, but not their best interest.
Discussions of markets, for example, might assume an incredibly vast amount of information can be taken into accurate account, or that people are able to pick the best option from a group of intangibles. They can’t. Often even understanding all the options is not possible.
People respond to incentives and education so often are nudged to quit smoking, save money, get insurance, don’t drive after consuming… Using law, education, peer pressure, rebates, etc. In most cases, individual rights are more highly valued than community rights when no one else is being harmed – though second hand smoke, for example, may harm others; and dying of lung cancer in your 50s affects others.
North Americans value their individual rights. But be careful with your gum in Singapore. People resent being told what to do (many women voted for Trump, etc). No one is perfect, nor can be, but making positive changes should be a continual process.
The book “Nudge” gives good examples. Democracy is not a dictatorship.
The problem is that someone is going to have to make a decision. Markets may assume that someone can understand all the options even if they don’t, but government decisions assume that government workers can understand not only all of the options, which is theoretically possible, but also all the people involved preferences, which is not even theoretically possible.