Tell me. Have you ever been on the brink of financial ruin? When life seems bleak, rationality becomes incredibly remote. You'll burn through all your mental willpower just stressing about how you're going to pay enough of your bills to keep the utilities running. Cheap, high-calorie food and other time wasters typically avoided by the more financially able become essential escapes from the misery of baseline existence. They become the only way to stay sane.
If you want people to stop eating fast food and watching TV all day, give them something more to live for than their next junk food hit instead of making their continued survival even more uncertain.
I guess I disagree - I don't think that people with "lower income and education levels" are mentally incompetent and unable to manage their own lives.
I think they merely have different utility functions than me, and assign a lower value to health, but a higher value to leisure. And I'd argue they have the right to continue eating chips and watching TV - they just don't have the right to force other people to pay for their choices.
But lets take your theory of mental incompetence seriously - in that case, isn't the solution some sort of institutionalization? I.e., assign some bureaucrat to make good choices for them, rather than merely forcing responsible adults to pay for their irrational bad choices?
I didn't say they're mentally incompetent. I said that the state of being poor imposes such a high mental cost that even the intelligent poor struggle to apply their intelligence consistently. Even if we assume (incorrectly) that poor people are exclusively those on the left half of the intelligence distribution, the answer to their problems isn't charging them more money, thus making their problems generational because they can't afford the education, nutrition, and childcare necessary to end the cycle of ignorance. The answer lies in making a positive life more appealing, e.g. by making healthy foods more affordable, more available, and tastier; improving access to education (MITx/edX/Khan Academy/etc.); making education and societal contribution more culturally appealing through changes in entertainment and early education; etc.
It's probably worth mentioning the philosophy that drives my opinions on these issues. I want to minimize individual and total human suffering while maximizing individual and total human potential. In other words, I believe that every human being should have the right not to suffer, along with the opportunity to make their best contribution to the progress of humanity. Being poor and trapped by the mental stresses of staying alive leads to suffering, fast food temporarily alleviates that suffering, and increasing the cost of health insurance will exacerbate that suffering. I still care even if it's someone else suffering while I enjoy the money I might save each month by not paying for their lifestyle.
I said that the state of being poor imposes such a high mental cost that even the intelligent poor struggle to apply their intelligence consistently...I believe that every human being should have the right not to suffer, along with the opportunity to make their best contribution to the progress of humanity.
You seem to want to have it both ways. Either the poor are adults capable of making their own choices, or they aren't.
If they are mentally competent, they have the right not to "suffer" ("suffering" isn't the word I'd normally use to describe a life of leisure). They just choose not to exercise it.
Your definition of competence seems to differ significantly from mine. For one thing, there's not some binary threshold of competence vs. incompetence. What I'm describing is a temporary condition caused by depletion of mental willpower. You also seem to be applying a degree of the typical mind fallacy. Maybe you are the ubermensch incarnate and could maintain total control of your creative mental faculties through the most painful torture, but most people have limits. That doesn't make them incompetent; it just makes them human.
Maybe you are the ubermensch incarnate and could maintain total control of your creative mental faculties through the most painful torture...
Hardly. I certainly wouldn't hold a person being tortured responsible for their actions, but I also wouldn't permit them to make their own decisions.
My position is that the right to make a choice and the responsibility for that choice go hand in hand. Either the poor are allowed to make choices and suffer the consequences, or they aren't. If you'd like shades of grey, perhaps they could jointly make decisions with a guardian, and the guardian is partially responsible for those choices.
I take exception to the example of invisibly raising of insurance prices as a result of unannounced data mining. It's entirely unfair to hold people to standards they aren't told about in advance.
If you want people to stop eating fast food and watching TV all day, give them something more to live for than their next junk food hit instead of making their continued survival even more uncertain.