Creighton on individual choice

I'm going to have to finally start paying for The Australian if Adam Crieghton keeps coming out with columns like this. 

German doctors were the first to discover a link between tobacco smoking and cancer in the 1930s. National Socialism declared cancer "the number one enemy". Along with a passion for the natural environment, the Fuhrer hated smoking -- a relic of the sort of decadent liberal lifestyle that undermined the health of the "volk".

In measures foreshadowing Australia's own "pioneering" efforts to reduce smoking, Nazi Germany cracked down on cigarette advertising, banned smoking at work, in government offices, and ultimately on buses and trains too.

The Reich itself exhorted Germans to change: "Food is not a private matter" and "You have a duty to be healthy" blared from government placards.

Today's healthy living crusaders, roused into excitement by any tax or ban that might ostensibly improve people's health, most obviously do not adhere to the other heinous tenets of National Socialism. But they do share its bizarre and sometimes shrill desire to curtail others' eating and leisure habits, supposedly in the interests of the individuals concerned and the greater public good.

"Everywhere in the West public health doctrine has drifted from public-good concerns, such as contagious diseases, toward a frontal attack on individual choices and politically incorrect lifestyles," writes Canadian economics professor Pierre Lemieux of University of Quebec.

Hitler's Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research helped calculate the "national economic cost of smoking". But its figures were probably as fraudulent as those routinely concocted today.

I know about Godwin's Law. But counting "reduced productivity" from smoking as a social cost makes most sense where the underlying model is that you belong to the State.

I'll quibble with a couple more minor points. 

First, Creighton notes that economists sometimes recommend tobacco or alcohol excise taxes because consumption is relatively insensitive to price. That's one read of the general Ramsey optimal-tax literature. But I'm pretty sure that the proper reading of Ramsey is that, because we cannot tax leisure, optimal tax policy will tax more heavily those things more complementary to leisure than to labour. It's less the absolute price elasticity of demand that matters than the cross-elasticity with labour and leisure choices. 

Second, Creighton suggests that government enthusiasm for taxing tobacco rather than alcohol despite that nasty drunks impose more costs on others than do nasty smokers stems from pure classicism and elitism. That could be the case - we tend to impose excise on products imposing fiscal externalities that also draw social disapproval. But I would note that light to moderate drinkers are most sensitive to price. They impose little to no harm on others. And they even have reduced overall mortality rates. Heavy drinkers are rather less responsive to prices. Hiking alcohol taxes does more to turn moderate drinkers into light drinkers than it does to turn heavy drinkers into moderate drinkers. If anything, the evidence suggests that heavy drinkers save up for a few binge events rather than curb consumption from the peaks: they drink less on low-drinking days rather than cutting back on their worst excesses. Prices are blunt instruments for dealing with alcohol related harm in the same way that petrol excise is a blunt instrument for dealing with speed-related car crashes.

Update: In comments below, a few folks have gone a bit farther than I would in opposing tobacco control policy. Rather than get involved there, I'll just put a statement up here.

First, there is no chance that there is any slippery slope connecting tobacco control policy to eugenics or other parts of the Nazi programme.

However, I agree with DragonFly in comments below that there is an underlying mindset that is common to both movements. To view it as a cost to the State that you make choices that burden the State through lower tax revenues requires that, deep down, you think we're all kinda owned by the State. It's the view that says we have a responsibility not to ourselves, but to the State, to choose more healthy behaviours even if we would prefer to consume less health and more fun. It's the vision that says there's one right way of living, irrespective of your own hopes and dreams. To me, that's the vision of human nature that was given fullest policy fruition in Nazi Germany. I do not think that public health paternalism in any way leads us to Nazi Germany. I do think that it will continue pushing on every margin of socially disapproved behaviours that provide individuals, primarily from the lower classes, with pleasure in exchange for risk. Tobacco, alcohol, fast food, soda.

But it's not a view that started with them. You can see it in Thomas Carlyle's view that blacks could never be made fully human unless they had the benefit of slaveowners to guide them towards work with the lash. There's a right way of living, and we'll force you to it with the lash if necessary.

Economics was called the Dismal Science by Thomas Carlyle because, in his view, we would deny blacks the opportunity to become human through the use of the lash. Mill's opposition to Carlyle was grounded as much in his view that slavery was repugnant as in his view that we should all be treated as equally capable of choosing our own vision of the good life. Perhaps comprehensive public education could help us in making better choices as we ourselves see things, or for teaching us about the higher-order pleasures. But fundamentally, the good is subjective and individual. And if I, with full knowledge, choose to consume less health and more fun, then it is too great an infringement on individual liberty to compel me to choose otherwise. Economics starts here: methodological individualism. There is no good outside of what we believe to be good, no value that exists outside the system. And where we disagree on what is good, and where we are not harming any other in our personal pursuit of that good, there is nobody who can stand above us and tell us we have wrongly chosen.