Individual liberties, regulation and the obesity epidemic (and possibly other stuff)

There are merits and demerits to lumping everything together like above. Yes there are similarities but there are also differences. Consider vaccination for a moment, as this is one that confuses me no end. Personal liberties are often interrelated. That idiot that didn't vaccinate is the reason this particular virus is still such a dangerous threat. Yet, can we forcibly invade his body autonomy? I don't think so, even if his actions restrict the freedom of others. Take smoking, a person can smoke I believe they should be allowed to take that risk but there's also a clash of liberties. Passive smoking, drain on limited health resources, to name but a few. Whenever the question of individual liberty is considered one must never forget that it's not always just the liberty of the sole individual that's in consideration.

I don't think anything in this world can be black and white. Any core principles can be broken if the benefits outweigh the risk. Establishing where that balance lies is bloody hard but it's far better than the alternatives of absolutes. Which is what leads to the rubbish of bigotry, liberal fascism, right wings fruitcakes etc.

All that said there are very real pragmatic reasons for such absolutes. Like I said, none of this is easy. The people who try to make it so are possibly doing humanity a disservice.

It is not about banning soda, it is simply a disincentive towards casual and unthinking excess. We tax cigarettes and alcohol to hell, there are limitations on what advertising can be done for either, age limitations and legal sale hours (not all of which I think is effective).

The slippery slope has already, if you'll endure the mixed metaphor, sailed. Government has power over you, we're just going to have to hope that the cut and thrust of public discourse will keep them from verging too far into regulation.

I don't think conflating government regulation of public health issues and marriage equality is anyway meaningful or useful (unless one simply has an anti-government agenda, in which case I'm not sure there is much conversation to be had).

This isn't about me knowing better than someone, it is what the science tells us, what the medical fact tells us. Smoking of anything more than a trivial amount and large amounts of alcohol or sugar are very bad for one's health, and very bad for the public finances when healthcare comes into it. Someone still has the freedom to choose to smoke or eat sugar or drink alcohol to the point where it is effective suicide if they like, I just want it to be made difficult to do this unknowingly.

My opinion is that the government has the right and the duty to legislate so as to disincentivise these things. That's my position and think it is very clear - so far I don't think you have stated a position beyond expressing ambiguous disquiet around the role of government. Are you a libertarian? Should we abolish all government regulation?

My gf was part of the research team for the large Irish study recently that showed a significant correlation between sugar sweetened beverages and childhood obesity, I got to see some of the questionnaires that parents returned that were frankly shocking.

The number of parents that said they gave their kids soft drinks over healthier alternatives for cost reasons was shocking. Or even who wouldn't give them water instead because they didn't like it, and it was just easier to give them SSBs.

I used to be against the idea of a sugar tax for personal liberties reasons but then I realized that it wouldn't significantly affect people who consume sensible quantities of the stuff, whereas those who consume a lot would be more likely to feel the impact and rethink their buying habits for economic reasons, if they're not prepared to consider the health reasons. I'd be prepared to take a small hit if it meant a healthier society overall.

You have to consider the economic and public health impacts as well; obesity related diseases cost the health service roughly €1 billion every year, I think it makes sense to recoup some of this cost directly from source.

bluewolf wrote: »

Banning/ over-taxing things is the lazy way out and ultimately isn't going to solve anything imo. Education on the facts is what people need. Cooking classes in school on tasty basics that aren't instant noodles and a chipper. You can stay away from sugar drinks & juices and still eat your way into unhealthiness and obesity quite easily.
Sure the info is out there for us internet experts, but as I said elsewhere, if all you know is people drinking or eating badly and nobody has ever told you otherwise or even showed you the actual benefits or cons of it, how do you know what's wrong. Parents give their kids sugar drinks from childhood. Or packets of crisps. Potato, what's that? People come on H&F going "I know about the calories but like drinking 10 cans of coke a day isn't bad otherwise is it?"
And when I say education I don't mean govt sponsored agri-pushing "eat more wheat! we need to prop up our industries", but something based on actual research. Which changes too based on best knowledge and this needs to be kept up to date.
In addition to this remember the low fat high sugar thing that was being peddled big time - why should people think sugar is bad if it's "low fat".

All of these things are helpful and can absolutely work in tandem with regulation of high sugar food and drink.

(Sure, include fruit juice if you like, but A: there certainly isn't a relevant percentage of obese people driving up to McD's and getting a gallon jug of fresh orange juice - so the point is moot - and B: juice at least has some other nutritional content and is low in sodium, unlike coke)

lol yeah, one day these liberals are all "stop using the law to promote religion" and the next day they're all "hey law, stop this guy from stabbing me" lol liberals make up your mind about the government :pac::D:D:P

This is going to be a long post. I think I'll throw in some TL;DRs for anyone wanting to skim.

Zillah wrote: »

I don't think conflating government regulation of public health issues and marriage equality is anyway meaningful or useful (unless one simply has an anti-government agenda, in which case I'm not sure there is much conversation to be had).

People really do get hung up on analogies, even when it's explicitly stated that what's being compared is not their seriousness but rather a logical construct that underpins the two examples.

I'm not trying to score points using some easy emotional target - I'm picking an obvious example that virtually everyone on this forum agrees with so I don't have to spend time finding one you would accept. You can compare commonalities in anything.

You can't dismiss arguments by mislabling that comparison as conflation to suit your own arguments. If the elements I'm comparing are not analogous than by all means tell me why and I'll stop making the comparison.

Zillah wrote: »

This isn't about me knowing better than someone, it is what the science tells us, what the medical fact tells us. Smoking of anything more than a trivial amount and large amounts of alcohol or sugar are very bad for one's health, and very bad for the public finances when healthcare comes into it. Someone still has the freedom to choose to smoke or eat sugar or drink alcohol to the point where it is effective suicide if they like, I just want it to be made difficult to do this unknowingly.

There are several elements to this:

1) I think you're incorrectly entangling scientific consensus with governmental policy. (TL;DR the door left open to allow science to influence public policy cannot be closed when bull**** turns up.)

That there is a consensus in how to avoid the negative health effects of consuming certain products does not mean that the government will correctly apply the recommended policies.

We already have a system in place that is perfectly capable of taking the opinions of experts on board and using them to drive policy, yet that clearly doesn't always happen.
You have governments (local for the most part) prohibiting the use of flouride in drinking water, you have huge swathes of governments, especially in the US, ignoring climate science, you have the anti-women abortion policies based on faulty information, you have the nonsensical approach to drug classification all over the place (to the point where the appointed experts are even fired for not bending to the politicisation of drug policy).

You might say "just because it doesn't work doesn't mean that it couldn't", and you'd be correct. Lacking an option that promotes liberty, I would hope for a more fact-based approach to governmental policy.

The problem is that I do not think that you can distinguish between the apparatus used by science-driven policy and bull****-driven policy.
So the same power that, for example, penalises the use of fossil-fuel driven cars based on wanting to combat climate change, can be used to impede the sale of electric cars.

Scientific consensus isn't an executive tool - there's no overlord who decides what is and isn't a fact. All the scientific consensus does, from a political perspective, is give you some ammunition to win support. It's by no means the only form or even most powerful form of ammunition.


2) People have different, equally valid priorities.
Saying there's a benefit from a medical perspective is pretty much a completely empirical statement.

Saying there's a general benefit to society or to the individual is a value judgement and the only person who's opinion is important is the individual in question. They decide whether stuffing their faces is worth the health risk....

3).... except there's the whole socialised medicine issue. (TL;DR, practicality isn't a license to abandon logical consistency - certainly not on a debate forum).

That certainly could complicate the matter, however, the issue I raised a yesterday, vis a vis gays, is important here.

If there was a public health or wellbeing issue raised in opposition to, for example, legalising homosexuality, is that a reasonable objection?
On this issue, pretty much the whole forum would agree that even if legalising homosexuality created a problem for the health service (like if it increased AIDS or something), that still wouldn't be a reason to keep a sexual preference illegal.

The problem with trying to dismiss this line of thought as being irrelevant because civil rights are more important is that we've already had laws like this that use moralistic or health-based arguments. They weren't overturned because there was a fundamental shift that abandoned their underpinnings in law - they were overturned because there was a shift in popularity.
That they were incorrect from moral or logical standpoint isn't actually relevant unless the scientific consensus is forcibly and rigorously imposed to steer public policy.
The politician who's pushing for a ban on phone masts because they give you brain cancer doesn't give a **** what the scientific consensus is and the success or failure of such a law being enacted will only very loosely be determined by it.

Why are those arguments unreasonable for a serious issue like civil rights but perfectly ok for more minor civil liberties?

If there is no fundamental issue with the logic (ie - the government should interfere to influence public health as it sees fit) then do you have a non-arbitrary distinction between what issues are serious enough?

I would think that here of all places would place a value on being logically consistent, not because being logically consistent is nice or wins you points but because being anything else is totally intellectually dishonest.

4) "I just want it to be made difficult to do this unknowingly."

The specifics of the law are irrelevant - whether it's banning cups over a certain size, using a certain % of sugar in drinks or whatever - you're intruding on what a businesses can and can't sell.

That's really nothing to do with improving the knowledge of the consumer. Totally unrelated.

Undermining the decision to live unhealthily by addressing it in school curricula would be an example of how to address that issue. Even stuff like putting pictures of cancerous lungs on cigarette packets, which does make certain authoritarian strides against businesses (purely in terms of deciding how they can package their product), still primarily increases the choice of the consumer by giving them extra information.

If education improves the healthcare considerations by people eating more healthily as a result of it, it makes legal interference at the point of sale redundant.