Originally Posted by
Armitage
As an European I'm actually surprised to hear that it made you wonder about the ethicality of it, because for me it feels like the only right thing to do. The corpos sway the people to buy their products by lowering prices, via lowering the quality standard. Healthy food has high quality and is therefore more expensive than junkfood. It is called junkfood for a reason, after all, it is cheap to make and mostly waste products. For instance chicken chuggets are the remains of a chicken's carcass when the chicken fillet, the chicken wings, and every other quality meat has been removed. What remains are scrapes of meat, organs like the chicken's bowels, and bones. This is then all put into an industrial blender and mixed into a paste from which they produce your chicken nuggets. The carcass paste is then deep-fried, in order to obfuscate its taste. This is why junkfood isn't nutritious, because it's made from junk, from actual waste. Research has showed that pizza can be healthy, but only in Italy where pizzas are made from high-quality, fresh, and vitamin rich ingredients, such as fresh tomatoes, fresh fish, artisanal cheese, and good olive oil. In the United States of America, however, pizza is reduces to a mere junkfood, made from artificially sweetened ketchup, industrially produced cheese, the remains of the fish, and preserved olives. Were an artisanal Italian pizza baker to move to the United States, he would go bankrupt almost immediately, as not quality, but cheapness is what the American market competes on. And this is the sole consequence of the lack of a proper minimum income. Not only does the minimum wage in the States exclusively apply to civil servants, the minimum wage that they are entitled to is below any proper European living standard.
When libertarians argue against implementing a sugar tax with which to subsidize healthy foods, because it would limit autonomy, I point towards the lack of minimum income limiting people's autonomy to buy the more expensive healthy foods, when they desire to do so. Research has proved that people are fat not due to inherent moral deficiency, as libertarianism blames them with. Instead, they are fat due to the truly toxic environment that they live in leaving them no other choice than to keep consuming the junk that the corpos stuff down their throats, until these people literally die. Just look at the tobacco industry earning money from poisoning people and polluting the air with harmful carcinogens, while putting in addictive nicotine to ensure that the people continue buying their products, until they fall death! Libertarianism is merely a corporate propagandized ideology with which they reinforce their power over the people. For me it is thus a no-brainer to vote for anything that breaks the power of the corpos, which are poisoning us.
I liked the World Health Organization article that you posted, by the way. Also, heroin addiction is neither a choice, the Rat Park experiment has showed that poor parental contact and a lack of social support by friends and family predispose people towards the use of drugs, in order to numb their qualms. But in addition to this, heroin is also biologically addictive, so once people are hooked on it, it is important to provide them methadon freely, in order to wane them off their biological addiction. But without treating their lack of social support, steady income, and a social safety net to help them stay clean, they are likely to relapse. The government should take an active role in helping people rehabilitate from their addictions, because regardless of using the American libertarian or European utilitarian vantage point, drug addiction limits people's choice to stay clean, and it harms them, their family and friends, as well as society en large.