taking people’s options away for their own good, because you think they will make the wrong decisions for themselves, is almost always bad.
But it can make sense to take away options they probably wouldn’t want to take anyway (yes, you may be wrong here) but if they exist, it is too tempting for a third party to navigate them into situations where they would be forced to take this option.
To give a specific example, I am happy that I am legally prevented from selling myself into slavery. I’d really hate to do it accidentally, just because I missed something hidden among dozen pages of fine print when signing a phone contract or something like that.
Or, imagine a sleazy landlord, renting a room to an inexperienced poor girl. Suppose she wants to pay with money. But if he is sufficiently smart, he can easily create a trap, when at some moment, using some bullshit contractual penalty, he takes away all her money… and then generously offers that she can pay the next month with sex instead, rather than go homeless. From a near-sighted perspective, yes, having such option is better than automatically going homeless. But the larger picture is that having such laws dramatically increases the motivation of the sleazy landlord to create this trap in the first place, so I would expect such situations to happen often, as some of the landlords would likely create an anonymous online forum to share advice.
But it can make sense to take away options they probably wouldn’t want to take anyway (yes, you may be wrong here) but if they exist, it is too tempting for a third party to navigate them into situations where they would be forced to take this option.
To give a specific example, I am happy that I am legally prevented from selling myself into slavery. I’d really hate to do it accidentally, just because I missed something hidden among dozen pages of fine print when signing a phone contract or something like that.
Or, imagine a sleazy landlord, renting a room to an inexperienced poor girl. Suppose she wants to pay with money. But if he is sufficiently smart, he can easily create a trap, when at some moment, using some bullshit contractual penalty, he takes away all her money… and then generously offers that she can pay the next month with sex instead, rather than go homeless. From a near-sighted perspective, yes, having such option is better than automatically going homeless. But the larger picture is that having such laws dramatically increases the motivation of the sleazy landlord to create this trap in the first place, so I would expect such situations to happen often, as some of the landlords would likely create an anonymous online forum to share advice.