Illiberal liberalism

I've written about Adrian Wooldridge's new book, Centrists of the World Unite!: The Lost Genius of Liberalism, for The Critic. I agree with much of it and it's very good as a history of liberal thought, but when he offers a prescription for change, he is more centrist than liberal. A lot of it doesn't offer change at all...

 

Under the heading “The case for liberal paternalism”, he makes such a shallow and uninformed case for lifestyle regulation that one starts to doubt whether he has read On Liberty. In addition to making a number of factual errors, he puts forward a series of hoary old chestnuts that he seems to think are argument-winning zingers. So you think you like freedom, eh? What about the drunk driver that kills someone? (Drink driving is banned.) Why should thin people have to pay for the healthcare of fat people? (The obese take less out of the welfare state than the thin because they don’t live as long.) He cites Richard Thaler’s work on behavioural economics to justify “nudging” and “soft paternalism” and then lists a slew of anti-smoking policies that Thaler would consider to be unacceptable because they impose costs and cannot be opted out of. 

He rejoices in people being banned from smoking not only inside but outside and then says that similar tactics need to be used against people who eat “fattening foods”. He celebrates governments that put “comprehensive taxes on unhealthy food” and cheers on Japanese companies that “measure the waistlines of employees to make sure that they are not getting too fat”. “We should go further”, he says. “Why not use the proceeds of food taxes to subsidize healthy foods?” (Because the government doesn’t control the price of food.)

The problem with this is not so much that the policies he proposes are ineffective, though they are (Britain’s sugar tax, which Wooldridge thinks is wonderful, did absolutely nothing to reduce obesity and nor did the warning labels put on “unhealthy” food in Chile.) The real problem is twofold. Firstly, whatever else they might be, policies that “demonise” (his word) consumers of tobacco, cast them out from private buildings, extort money from them through sin taxes and restrict where they can buy the product are not liberal; a word that, as the author helpfully reminds us, is derived from the Latin word libertas, meaning liberty. Wooldridge is right to say that John Stuart Mill was comfortable with more state intervention than some libertarians care to admit, but when it came to state-sponsored paternalism he was crystal clear. “To tax stimulants for the sole purpose of making them more difficult to be obtained,” he wrote, “is a measure differing only in degree from their entire prohibition; and would be justifiable only if that were justifiable. Every increase of cost is a prohibition, to those whose means do not come up to the augmented price; and to those who do, it is a penalty laid on them for gratifying a particular taste.” Laws restricting where alcohol can be sold, said Mill, are “suited only to a state of society in which the labouring classes are avowedly treated as children or savages.” If banning people from smoking outdoors and having the government define and prohibit “misinformation” is Wooldridge’s idea of liberalism, we can only be thankful that he never developed an interest in fascism.

The second problem is that if Wooldridge wants a government that will take on populism by hassling smokers, meddling with the food supply and censoring the internet, he has already got it. Under Boris Johnson — the supposed populist “strongman” — the UK put into legislation the most stringent restrictions on “junk food” marketing and promotion in the world. His successor, Rishi Sunk, announced the total prohibition of tobacco, albeit over a timeframe that is almost surreal. Both policies were eagerly pursued by Keir Starmer when he became Prime Minister, as was the Online Safety Act. The House of Lords recently tried to ban social media for under-16s, Kemi Badenoch has already said that the Conservatives will enact such a ban, and it is only a matter of time before it becomes official Labour policy. Is it any wonder that populists talk about the Uniparty?

 

Do read it all. 

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