Couldn’t We Just Ban It?
First of all, everyone should watch/listen to Megan McArdle and Raj Patel’s bloggingheads discussion about food, global trade and development. Usually, I find people on the Naomi Klein/anti liberalization side of these discussions to be incredibly frustrating, but Patel is clearly a very smart, rigorous and intellectually honest person in these discussions. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a real bona fide social scientist and former development economist. On a slight side note, why hasn’t Dani Rodrik been on blogginheads yet? Rodrik v Cowen? Rodrik v Patel? That would be sweet.
Ok, ok, back to the point. Towards the end of the episode, they discuss a “junk food” tax. McArdle’s against it, Patel is skeptically for it. The main point Megan makes – besides that these type of paternalistic taxes are paternalistic – is that a fast food tax would likely push middle and upper middle class folks into eating less crap, while poor people, who have drastically fewer food options, would be eating the same crap and just paying more for it. This seems like a silver bullet argument against a tax, but not a silver bullet argument against a ban. McArdle and Patel are, after all, using cigarette regulations as a model for their discussion of junk food. And, many municipalities are getting past the weak tea of taxes and getting straight to banning cigarette smoking in public. If we agree that junk food and cigarettes both exact high social and personal costs and that people are limited in their options as far as consumption goes, shouldn’t we just ban junk food?
Of course, I’m not saying that we should tell ever McDonald’s and Jack in the Box to board up – after all, where am I supposed to eat cheap? – but when it comes to consumption of specific ingredients in high amounts that is incredibly harmful, namely trans fats and large amounts of high fructose corn syrup, trying to internalize the costs through taxes or greater information is likely to be impractical. We could just accelerate the Hayekian magic by banning the most egregious ingredients from mass market food and see what the fast food joints and supermarkets do with that.
