The anti-fun alliance
Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 12:54PM Following on from John’s blog on Tuesday, it’s getting ever clearer that there’s a burgeoning conspiracy to clamp down on any activity that might conceivably be medically risky.
First it’s smoking, and now drinking. Also, the pressure is on eating: lobbyists are forever floating ideas for calorie taxes, enforced food labelling, government warnings and so on. And the same people seem to crop up time and again with the same ideas for ruining our pleasures. They have formed a semi-overt anti-fun alliance.
Who knows what’s to come after that? The range of voluntary activities that are potentially hazardous is almost unlimited. Living in a city (air pollution). Gambling. Going on holiday. Sport, driving, running, walking. Life itself is full of hazard, and you end up logically with only one conclusion – we shouldn’t live at all (which of course introduces a neat circular argument).
The point is that no consideration is ever given to the upsides of risky activity. Getting completely hammered, for example, can be enormous fun. Not just chemically speaking. Drunken parties where everyone’s smoking are often the basis of lasting friendships, forming those crucial shared experiences which provide the source of such mirth and gossip early on in a relationship. If you go around as a po-faced youth refusing to drink more that 3 units or whatever and staying indoors when everyone else is out the back having a fag, then you would be miserable. If everyone did it, society would disintegrate.
Of course, it is possible to have fun without taking intoxicants. Watching a film is okay, as is playing chess or reading a good book. You can have a good chat over a cup of coffee (sorry, redbush tea) in the lunch hour. So I suppose it is possible to envisage a society where everyone enjoys themselves simply by playing backgammon (sorry, that’s gambling, err, Monopoly). But to get there requires such social engineering that the whole point of the relatively free society we’ve created is ruined.
Reader Comments (1)
The state's job in these things is to assess the danger, prevent under 18's from engaging in hazardous activities and ensure that adults are informed as to the potential consequences of their choices. If adults still choose to engage in what safety groups, the state, doctors, or whoever deems to be risky behaviour, the only reasonable response, in a society which claims to value freedom, is for the state to simply let them.
The problem is that sin taxes are a very good form of income for the government. I am sure you are familiar with this quote from Revenue:
(The extra 23% VAT on the retail price, including the excise already paid, adds up to quite a chunk too).But in order to avail of the cash from sin taxes the government has to sign up to two key ideas.
1. The government has to claim that it is it's job not only to point out hazards, but to force people to stop engaging in hazardous activities.
2. That sin taxes actually work to significantly reduce hazardous behaviour.
The first is an ideological position which sets us on the road to a police state, while the second ignores the complexity of economics, supply and the ability of humans to think their way around a problem.
There are plenty of reports which claim to prove the effectiveness of sin taxes, but I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation why three excise duty hikes (1986, 1989 & 1994) failed to stop or slow the increase in alcohol consumption, or why alcohol consumption has been falling for the last 10 years, despite the advent of below cost selling by supermarkets.
Nor have I herd a good answer to the simple question, if sin taxes work, why are we still talking about it after generations of people paying them? When can we expect to see some results?