The primary role of any government in a democratic society should be to protect the citizens it is answerable to. This is, at first glance, far from being a controversial statement. An army, a police force and a health service in most modern countries provide this role without detracting from the liberties of most of the population.
How does a government protect citizens from those who have the legal means to profit at their expense? What tools can a government use when the decision making of ordinary people is weaponised against them? In short, how can a government deal with the problems posed to public well being by the addiction industries?
Before answering that question, it's important to understand a fundamental principal upon which the gargantuan profits of the industries rest. Their various branches, food, alcohol, gambling, internet pornography and increasingly the gaming industry have long ago learned that overwhelming human impulse controls is a sound business strategy. Human beings in the 21st Century have the same nervous systems they had in the stone age when food was scarce, they are impulsed by risk and reward in the same way that neolithic hunter gatherers were and it is this nervous system that can be overwhelmed.
We are hard wired to seek out calories, to run away from our problems and to be excited by the thrill of risk because at one point in our evolution these traits were all useful and they ensured the survival of the species. It will be many millennia before human beings respond to sugar, alcohol, drugs, sexual images or games of risk or chance in any other way and those that would seek to exploit these tendencies have sought to convince the public that they don't exist.
This is done through the subtle art of public relations, which presents consumer choice as free will and an exercise of democratic decision making. The advocates of light touch regulation over the food, drink and gambling industries argue that it is not the role of governments to decide what and how much of a particular substance an individual can and should consume. Instead, the government's only role is policing the intoxicated individual's behaviour or cleaning up the various individual and social messes that result from addiction.
However, when it comes to our nervous systems and the substances and behaviours that they are bombarded with, the model of free will that is projected by right wing think tanks and free marketeers makes little sense. Can a child subjected to food and drink advertising exercise rational free will and choose between healthy and unhealthy food choices? If they could, there would be no point in advertising, which seeks to limit rational decision making and steer consumer choice making in a direction favourable to manufacturers and retailers.
Can a person who is starting to develop an emotional or a physical dependency on alcohol make rational, free choices about their own alcohol consumption? Addiction by its very definition is the replacement of choice with compulsion and the profits of the alcohol, gambling and illegal drug industries bear this truth out. For some individuals rational choice is possible, but in many cases this is the product of affluence and education.
Time and cash poor families coping with the endless demands of modern life and overwhelmed by stress make poorer choices about eating, exercise and lifestyles in general; not because they lack intelligence but because they lack the time, space and resources to consider their options in the way that pro choice advocates argue that all people are instinctively able to do. The global epidemic of obesity is showing us all that those capable of juggling hard work, healthy eating and who are resistant to the temptations of high calorie foods that the advertising industry bombards them with are in a minority.
For decades, the state has been in retreat when it comes to questions of taxation and regulation. Our prevailing economic thinking is that state intervention in the economy distorts the natural functioning of markets, which are simply places where buyers and sellers meet on equal terms. However, the power of the seller and the frequent vulnerability of the buyer in markets where the addiction industry is involved make a mockery of this simplistic notion. The main proponents of the perfect nature of markets are the ones who benefit from them the most, rarely does any participant lobby for the rules of the game to be changed when they are winning the game in question. However, just as it is the role of government to keep its citizens safe from physical harm or attack, it is also the role of government to keep its citizens safe from the consequences of market failure.
In a purely economic context the existence of obesity, bankruptcies from gambling addiction and morbid obesity are indications of market failure and governments have a right and a duty to use taxation and regulation to prevent this. Minimum pricing for alcohol, a tax on soft drinks and the regulation of gambling or internet pornography are not the predations of the nanny state but the effective control of private interests that act against the common good. When the wellbeing of the general population is put first, it is evidence of a healthy and effective democracy at work. When the interests of private profit eclipse this, the result is a democracy in decline.
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