Here's how I look at it: it's a trade-off like any other. There are people with unsustainable work practices in every job. It could be long hours, little sleep, performance enhancing drugs, etc. If it makes them deliver better work, they'll get rewarded for it in their career, but they're most certainly suffering consequences elsewhere. Family strain, health problems, emotional drain, loneliness.

The temptation is strong to ban other people from making different trade-offs than us, because it keeps them from besting us in competition and challenging our value systems. But what right do we have to dictate what other people should value and what trade-offs they're allowed to make with their own lives? My sweat, blood, and tears are mine and mine alone to give and withhold.

That's an interesting perspective and I hadn't really considered it like that.

But I believe there is a reasonable point at which people should not be expected to go beyond because it becomes ultimately too harmful for them (ok... maybe that's not our business) and society which has to deal with the fallout (very much our business). Its why we have labor laws. Laws on how long truck drivers can drive without sleeping. People shouldn't have to degenerate into selling their souls and risking the well being of others for short term survival. Society shouldn't degenerate to competition at this kind of level. It really shouldn't.

I do strongly believe in the individual's right to chose. But as with all ideologies, purity generally produces very sucky real world outcomes and a modicum of sense and nuance has to be applied for the thing to work. The powerful shouldn't be able to lay traps for the less informed and then stand back and say "oh well... they chose...they have to accept the consequences while I reap the benefits". That's not how civilization should work.

You have a good point, especially for low skill jobs that people often don't have the luxury of walking away from, because they need the money to pay the rent and put food on the table. I find myself increasingly favoring a basic income (but only along with abolishing the bulk of the regulatory and welfare state), which I think would address the concerns that you raise. No one would be compelled to stay in a job by hunger, only ambition.

Because rational people know that people aren't always rational.

Are you also opposed to those medians and guardrails on highways that impinge on your freedom to drive off the road when you so choose?

It's not quite so cut and dried, though. As safety measures are introduced, people tend to increase risky behavior which ends up mitigating the new safety measures.

For example, since you bring up roads -- narrower lanes make safer drivers: http://www.planetizen.com/node/80229/another-study-shows-nar...

I think that's a spurious analogy. The public has no duty to build roads such as to enable your preferred suicide technique. The public has no right to tell you how many hours you can work or not. A job is a free exchange between two parties.

> A job is a free exchange between two parties.

That's a statement born out of extreme privilege. For substantial proportions of people, there is very little freedom involved: You take what is on offer, or you lose your house or don't eat. One side has an extreme amount of extra leverage, and some of them takes according advantage.

People died fighting for the 8 hour working day because without regulation employers simply did not give a shit if they were working people into an early grave. We have May Day labour demonstrations in large part of the world in part as a result of what is now the AFL-CIO wanting to commemorate the Chicago Haymarket massacre, and restart what was already then, in 1880's, a multiple decades long fight for human working hours.

In other instances, people burned to death because of employers that thought it ok to lock the factory doors to prevent workers from taking unauthorised breaks.

Is that an indication of a free exchange?

For a free exchange, both sides need to have reasonably equal power.

You make a good point. My response to a someone with a similar perspective on a different fork of this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11237231

I would love to hear your thoughts. I'm hopeful that both classical and progressive liberals can find common ground in a basic income. Combined, we are an unstoppable force for human freedom and prosperity.

If I can try to paraphrase: Criminalization has been so ineffective that you were simply expected to use meth at this one job you had, because everyone else was doing it.

And you think this might argue in favor of continued criminalization?

No, not at all. I agree... this kind of problem exists even with criminalization and I agree on the pretty obvious (to me anyway) need to do away with criminalization.

But problems of this kind could become worse if taking meth were legal. That's my only point.

It sounds pretty analogous to the problem about the incentive to take performance-enhancing drugs in professional sports. In this case the players might mostly prefer a world in which doping was banned, with effective enforcement, to one in which it was permitted, just because of the competitive pressure to take risks.

The personal barrier to entry would become worse with legalization, that the peer pressure would thrive on. But that logic would be true for other accounts, too. I've been thinking before that legalization, from the perspective of prior moralized prohibition, would seem like allowance or even encouragement, instead of deregulation because of a lack of or even of the futility of enforcement.

This was one anecdote. I have another anecdote where I was not expected to do meth. Can we turn your argument around now?

I don't think that meth is the point of this story. There are a lot of ways to trade off your health for higher productivity, not necessarily with illegal drugs. Professional athletes do this with extensive training and accepting injury rates. Salarymen do it with 80 hour workweeks.

The point is, they make this decision themselves. I don't think that your colleagues were somehow oblivious to the fact that meth is bad. I also doubt that your employer gave them meth disguised as "work-enhancing vitamins" or something. When people do things like that, they see the downsides, and they make this decision regardless.

Is it a bad decision, a mistake, for a person to trade his health and long-term well-being and health for his job? Personally, I think that it is. But I also think that people have fundamental human right to do this kind of mistake, that they should be free to decide it for themselves.

Would you die of hunger if you didn't take this job? I don't think so. Could you and your colleagues find a more relaxed job that would put roof over your head and food on your table? I don't know your situation, but somehow I think that yes, you could. So, you didn't take this job just because it was necessary to physically survive, which would be a different situation.

So, if a person doesn't have to sacrifice his health to survive for his job, but does it because he wants something more — should we stop him from it?

Have an upvote, but I don't think the solution to resolving the kind of problem you describe is criminalization of substances. In fact, I think the crazy controlling environment you describe fits hand in glove with criminalization. They both essentially grow out of a mindset that one person has some inherent right to control another in highly invasive, fundamental ways. A "live and let live" attitude would create laws and effective means to protect employees from abusive employers of the type you describe while not caring what drugs you choose to take, so long as you can behave. "Your right to swing your fist stops where my face begins" and all that.

Huh, have an upvote for bringing up a genuinely new point to me, thanks.

I've heard similar stories about how cooks abusing cocaine to keep up with the pace.

But I'd never made the connection that if it's legal, employers could expect performance-enhancing levels of productivity (more than I guess some restaurants and construction crews already do).

This is also an issue in professional sports and the olympics with athletes taking banned (but legal!) performance enhancing drugs. Similarly in colleges you see people abusing adderall or modafinil to study.