People are not machines, it’s not as simple as deciding whether to do something or not. You have stronger and weaker days. Temptation makes it harder to do what is in your best interests, even if you’ve decided on another day that you’d rather not partake.
Getting concrete about gambling: lots of people decide not to gamble and just don’t. Lots of people decide they don’t care whether they gamble and they do. But there are also many people in the middle, who would rather not gamble, but find that they sometimes act against their own best interests, and their own past resolutions to not gamble. Bombarding these people with offers of free bets increases the likelihood that they will gamble on their weaker days.
When I hear takes like yours, I feel very jealous. I would love to always act in my own best interests and according to some policy I predetermined. But that’s just not my experience of how life works.
I feel like you’re trying to force some sort of binary here, but I’m trying to say that you may choose not to gamble in general, on day X, but find that you do gamble later.
In fact I would say that many gambling addicts have _chosen_ _not_ to gamble in some sense, but in another moment they do find that they choose to. There’s a temporal aspect to this.
Advertising gambling to those people makes it less likely that they will follow through on their choices.
Do you always do literally everything you choose with a clear head? Never procrastinate, get angry, feel sad, whatever? It’s really hard for me to see your perspective on this.
This means you can say people voluntarily got into their addiction, but you cannot say they voluntarily stay in their addiction.
Cigarettes are a good example. It is easier to wean off from cigarettes and switch to vaping and then quit vaping, than to quit smoking directly.
This is because the transition cost from smoking to vaping is much lower.
The same way sober alcoholics would disagree with a similar statement about alcohol addiction.
"I want to eat this bucket of ice cream... But I also really want to not want to."
Lost savings means an impoverished individual and potentially an impoverished family and children. These draw support resources from the state and community, are more likely to turn to crime, and are less likely to develop into contributing members of society.
Exhibit A: Tobacco. Prior to regulation, it was advertised widely and thought to be not that bad.
Once we regulated knowledge and consent, use plummeted.
For knowledge, we display pictures on the pack and carton of people in agony dying of lung cancer. We tell them the odds. For consent, we mitigate by saying "WARNING: nicotine is an addictive chemical. Nicotine can be more addictive than Heroine".
The fallacy here is that markets are naturally free and government intervention makes markets less free. That's rarely the case. Often, intervention makes the market more free.
