Still on holiday. The following is a short article I wrote to explain what lifestyle economics is all about and why it matters. You may be interested to compare it with this article from the newly formed UK Public Health Network which says that the word 'lifestyle' should be banned because it implies that people are free.
If market liberals stand idly by as the state sets prices, restricts
commercial speech and demonises industries (and their customers), they
will stand for anything. Under the pretext of ‘public health’, basic
levers of competition—price, content and marketing—are increasingly
falling under state control. With the advent of minimum pricing and
plain packaging, the possibility of the government dictating how much a
product sells for and what it looks like has become very real.
These developments are of no little concern to free marketers and
social liberals. We are told, for example, that the obesity “epidemic”
requires us to accept “a more invasive role for government.” The European Union openly discusses the need for “lifestyle regulation”.
When New York mayor Michael Bloomberg decided that it should be against
the law to sell a pint of Coca-Cola, a professor of medicine declared
that: “The trivial issues of personal freedom
in this case pale before the public health and welfare exigency.”
Although it is predicted that one in three children born today will live
to the age of 100, we are told that our health is at risk like never
before from “non-communicable diseases” caused by our lifestyles. In the
face of this “crisis”, we are expected to sacrifice liberty as if we
were on a war-time footing.
Some would argue that the liberties under threat are of a minor nature,
or are only of concern to the industries involved. But it is not the
businessman who suffers most when prices rise and choice is
restricted—he may find ways of profiting from both—but the consumer. And
whilst it is inevitable that when authorities infringe on liberty, they
begin with products and activities which are controversial or obscure,
liberals recognise that there is an important issue of principle at
stake that goes far beyond the unpopular and perhaps unsavoury test
case. It therefore falls to liberals to defend “trivial issues of
personal freedom”. If they do so, the bigger issues of personal freedom
often take care of themselves.
This is not merely a philosophical position. The hazards and failures
of state paternalism can be shown empirically, and the Lifestyle
Economics workstream will put hard evidence at the heart of all its
publications. Even if we accept that policy should be viewed through the
narrow lens of ‘public health’, many of the interventions recommended
do not work on their own terms. Every man-made law must overcome the law
of unintended consequences and the law of demand. Time and time again,
we see well-intentioned but ill-considered policies backfire by fuelling
the black market, exacerbating poverty and encouraging more harmful
consumption.
Adam Smith said that he had “never known much good done by those who
affected to trade for the public good”. The same might be said today of
those who purport to act in the public interest today, whether they be
self-appointed protectors of ‘public morality’ or those who work in that
nebulous and ever expanding industry of ‘public health’ which today
provides the mandate for almost limitless state interference in what we
eat, whether we smoke, how much we exercise, how much television we
watch, how many items of fruit and veg we eat, how many units of alcohol
we drink, whether a price is too low or too high, if a packet of crisps
is too large or a pack of cigarettes too colourful, or a pint glass too
tall.
Free market liberals have warned of the dangers of ‘slippery slope’
regulation for many years. They argued that the treatment being meted
out to smokers would one day be dished out to consumers of any product
which carries a risk to health or morals, however small. “Should the
State dictate how many sausage butties I have for breakfast?” one
prominent doctor asked rhetorically in the Times. “Should the Health Minister be e-mailing me about my five-a-day broccoli and bananas?” His answer? “Yes and yes.” “If the advertising of tobacco can be banned because smoking harms the individual,” wrote another public health professional, “should not all advertising be much more circumscribed because the consumption it engenders harms the planet?” With fizzy drinks, ‘junk food’, alcohol, meat, cars and sugar
now being lined up as “the new tobacco” we start this programme from
halfway down that slippery slope. All but the most pious abstainers from
vice now find themselves in the cross-hairs of some single-issue
pressure group or other.
When the writer George Ade reflected on how prohibition had conquered
America in the 1920s, he recalled that “the non-drinkers had been
organising for fifty years and the drinkers had no organization
whatsoever. They had been too busy drinking.” Ordinary consumers are
often too busy to defend their lifestyles against well-organised special
interest groups. Businesses often spend too much time protecting their
narrow interests in the short term and fail to see the bigger picture.
The Lifestyle Economics workstream aims to show that bigger picture and
to reaffirm that the interests of consumers are best advanced by the
provision of accurate information, low prices and a wide range of
choices in a competitive marketplace.
No comments:
Post a Comment