Today in the New York Times SundayReview columnist Mark Bittman advocates taxing peoples' "bad" food decisions.
He says taxing junk food and using the proceeds to fund programs to encourage healthy eating "could save tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs."
Note the weasel word "could." But even if he is correct, doing so would be so utterly, perniciously, morally wrong that no amount of savings could justify it.
It is not government's job to be peoples' nanny, nor to use the power of government to save some people money at others peoples' expense. The freedom for companies to provide the food that people want and the freedom of people to buy and consume the foods they want is a fundamental human freedom. It is not the purpose of government to attempt to warp the marketplace to try to make us better, more virtuous eaters.
The U.S. government's man objective is not the promotion of safety, health and longevity, but the promotion of liberty. That requires that free citizens not be penalized for making choices at odds with the health nannies.
If one can't be free of tax coercion in the grocery store aisles and one's own refrigerator, in what manner is one actually free, as opposed to a ward of the state, being fed a state-sanctioned diet? It's despicable to think the government has right to take money from me because I like potato chips, in order to try to convince me not to eat potato chips.
If people didn't want these foods, they wouldn't be popular. There are things are more important to people than a few pounds of weight or a few extra years of life, and it's for free citizens to weight their own priorities in that matter, not for our "betters" to try to mold our behaviors to match their preferences.
Furthermore, taxes on undesirable products are economic tautologies. Bittman says: "Simply put: taxes would reduce consumption of unhealthful foods and generate billions of dollars annually."
This tax falls victim to the same uncomfortable cognitive dissonance that tobacco taxes do. Both intend to use the tax on the bad thing to reduce consumption of the bad thing. Of course, government's drug of choice is revenues. Tobacco taxes generate billions in revenues and presumably Bittman is correct that these would, too.
Any revenue government gets it soon regards as necessary. Government would, again, just as in the case of tobacco, become dependent on a revenue source that it has an official interest in stamping out. And, as with tobacco, the revenue would soon be regarded as essential revenue, both because it would not remain solely target for its original purpose (encouraging healthy eating), but also because money is fungible and the more spending the government can categorize, however frivolously, as "encouraging healthy eating" leaves other general revenues available to spend on other programs.
The agencies and programs funded by massive junk food taxes would soon have a large interest in justifying their own existence. Only a fool would think that they would eventually shutter themselves willingly when American eating habits reached a sufficiently healthy level. No, even if junk food consumption (and thus junk food revenues), dropped to zero, we'd be hearing endless impassioned arguments for how important the FDA's Healthy Diet Council (or whatever it would be called) is to Americans, and all the good it does. We'd be stuck with it forever.
Of course, junk food revenue levels would never come anywhere zero, any more than tobacco revenues have or will, because government loves that tasty revenue. Instead it would be used as an excuse to create protected, competition-free junk food cartels, just as the tobacco cartels are protected, squeezing out small producers with onerous regulations and huge financial and regulatory burdens to entering the market.
That's how the hand-in-glove operations of subsidies and regulatory agencies have ALWAYS worked -- in agriculture, automobiles, steel, tobacco, real estate -- everywhere they are used, they distort the market, reduce competition, increase government rent-seeking and promote the protection of established players over new entries to the market.
If people don't like dying 10 years younger because they eat too many potato chips, they'll stop eating potato chips. If they don't stop, it wasn't that important to them, and it's nobody else's business.
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