Comment by jdietrich

Not everyone believes that some amount of human death is acceptable collateral, but essentially everyone behaves as if that were true.

We could save ~47,000 deaths in the next year if we banned cars. Do you think that the deaths of innocent children is an acceptable trade-off for your right to drive? You might not like to think of it that way, but it's just objectively true that this is the trade-off we choose.

If we really care about human lives, why isn't the entire federal budget redirected towards healthcare and medical research? Do you think it's OK to watch children die of cancer just to fund national parks and space probes? If we care about all lives, why don't we spend the entire federal budget on humanitarian aid? What kind of heartless monster would watch children in Africa starve to death just to make their kid's school slightly nicer? If we care about all future lives, why are we squandering resources on consumption now, when compounding returns over centuries could allow those resources to provide vastly greater utility in future?

Everything has an opportunity cost and everything is a tradeoff. We pretend that the status quo has no ugly tradeoffs to protect our sanity, but that's obviously untrue. People die every day because of things we take completely for granted. They die for reasons that are often directly contradictory - I die for want of a regulation that would have prevented a medical accident, you die because of regulatory burdens that hinder the development or dissemination of new medical technology.

Musk might be a mindless vandal or a maverick genius; I am absolutely not intelligent enough to argue that point either way. What I do know is that it would be a miraculous coincidence if the federal government's priorities circa 2024 were so close to perfect that any radical change is prima facie wrong. I have to at least entertain the possibility that we have been stuck in a local maximum and have been squandering massive amounts of potential. A handful of deaths is, in the context of the US economy, actually a very cheap price to pay if you genuinely believe that you can find a fraction of a percentage point of GDP growth.