A nitpick: you are of course free to make any costly mistake if it only affects you and no one else.
Various safety laws protect innocent bystanders from mistakes other people make, e.g. losing control of a car due to excessive speed or alcohol intake, or spreading a virus.
The fact that tax money is spent on various social protection things, like health care, allows to legally limit one's apparently personal choices, like smoking, that increase the tax money spending due to those choices. Such is the nature of most, if not any, tax-funded welfare features.
There are very few costly mistakes that only affect you, though. I actually can't think of a single one.
Emergency healthcare is a public resource (you can only handle X patients per unit time) and it's a costly one. I would bet that most safety laws are forcing you to protect yourself by way of doing simple things that lower public medical costs. Even if you commit suicide, someone has to clean up your remains and deal with the potentially dangerous bio-materials.
Yes, you are free to do things that hurt only you, but good luck finding anything that does.
There are limits on those things, though. You can't burn your house down. You can't live in filth. You can't strip mine your land or pollute it. And you can get thrown in jail for failing to fulfill certain contracts, so it can be indirectly illegal. There's also fraud: you can't lie to enter a contract you know you can't fulfill. And it should be illegal to exploit people by offering them contracts they can't be expected to fulfill, even if it currently isn't.
Sure, I can just smash up my stuff or start a risky business. But the reason for that is that there isn't proof that what I'm doing constitutes failure. (They could be very educational activities.)
Just be careful to dispose of what's left of your property in a proper fashion (some electronic components are dangerous for the environment if you just throw them with your other trash).
Also, when you inevitably fail to uphold that contract, consider settling instead of fighting it in court to reduce costs to the justice system.
The fact that tax money is spent on various social protection things, like health care, allows to legally limit one's apparently personal choices, like smoking, that increase the tax money spending due to those choices. Such is the nature of most, if not any, tax-funded welfare features.
Which is one of the reasons so many people oppose government administered healthcare(At least in the US). Once the government is financially responsible for your healthcare, it has a legitimate stake in regulating the lifestyle decisions that you make.
For example, if the overwhelming evidence shows that consuming pork results in increased healthcare costs over time, the government has a compelling interest to prohibit the consumption of pork or since we know unequivocally that use of tobacco results in increased costs for healthcare, (as you mentioned)the government has already taken steps to limit its use but has not yet gone to far as to prohibit it (in large part) because the tax revenues collected on its sale are not inconsequential.
Coming from a social democracy I think the main difference in viewpoint is that the downward spiral has to stop somewhere because otherwise the damage not just to a person but to society can be too great - e.g. see communist revolutions. Letting whole families go bankrupt because of a medical issue is counterproductive even just using capitalistic values. Long term you want people to be prosperous enough to buy your stuff and educated enough to create value. Too many pressures towards negative social mobility is therefore a net loss for society. Thus you can simply regard social health care and social services as an investment towards future growth.
> The fact that tax money is spent on various social protection things, like health care, allows to legally limit one's apparently personal choices, like smoking, that increase the tax money spending due to those choices. Such is the nature of most, if not any, tax-funded welfare features.
This is a logical fallacy - smokers cost much less in terms of healthcare than healthy people. Mostly they die relatively young. Elder and end-of-life care is drastically reduced, and that is the biggest healthcare cost in most people's lives. If you lived to be 80 as a non-smoker, you would probably cost factors more than a smoker who died at 60-70, even with only a few years of end-of-life care.
Various safety laws protect innocent bystanders from mistakes other people make, e.g. losing control of a car due to excessive speed or alcohol intake, or spreading a virus.
The fact that tax money is spent on various social protection things, like health care, allows to legally limit one's apparently personal choices, like smoking, that increase the tax money spending due to those choices. Such is the nature of most, if not any, tax-funded welfare features.