> I reject the notion that you can be your own victim. If you choose to make decisions that hurt you, you must suffer the consequences; it is not the state's place to protect you from yourself.
Forget the state for a moment and try to scale it down. In a village where everybody knows and depends on each other, what would you do if an outsider came along and tricked one of your fellow villagers out of all their means?
When winter came, would you let that person die? No, you would use your own means to keep them alive.
Now, the next time this trickster came to town, would you just let them prey on the less perceptive of your fellow villagers again?
You're talking about fraud, I am not, your example does not apply. People like to gamble, they know they're probably going to lose, they are not being defrauded or lied to by being allowed to gamble.
There are countless problems with your analogy, however I will focus on one. Smoking pot recreationally cannot be equated with a trickster fooling someone out of all their money.
Forget the state for a moment and try to scale it down. In a village where everybody knows and depends on each other, what would you do if an outsider came along and tricked one of your fellow villagers out of all their means?
When winter came, would you let that person die? No, you would use your own means to keep them alive.
Now, the next time this trickster came to town, would you just let them prey on the less perceptive of your fellow villagers again?