Taxing junk food?

Nice story on the BBC World website. Leading UK medical bodies, among them the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, propose that soft drinks should be hit with a special tax (about 20p per litre). The objective, obviously, is to reduce demand for such products. Why would one want to reduce demand for such products? Mostly because they can be linked to the obesity epidemic in the country. According to the BBC report, 'one in four adults is classified as obese and one in three children is already obese or overweight before they finish primary school.' 

Basically these experts propose to treat soft drinks pretty much like smoking and alcohol are being treated in taxation term. The argument is that consumption of such junk food leads predictably to an increase in obesity and a whole range of known, and expensive to treat, illnesses caused by obesity. Reducing obesity would overall result in an increase in individual (and aggregative societal) well-being and longevity. These are clearly all desirable goals.  

To make things look good, their proposal also includes suggestions such as how government should spend the extra tax dollars (well, Pounds). It is proposed that government spends it on subsidies for fruit and school meal improvements in general. Great idea, considering that school meals in many school in that country qualify at best as junk food. 

There is no great risk that the current Conservative/Liberal UK government will run with this proposal. It has been busy trying to get industry to volunteer improvements on the soft drink frontiers. Industry folks claim that the addition of sugar to soft drinks has already decreased significantly. Well, assuming that that is true, I guess soft drinks that ain't directly linked to obesity could be exempted. I don't know, of course, whether there might be other problems with soft drinks beyond the sugar, indeed, I don't even know whether the industry guy who points out that 61% of soft drinks contain no added sugar tells the truth. He also points out that the consumption of soft drinks containing added sugar has fallen while obesity has increased anyway. If he's right, one can't help but think of other worthy targets for higher taxes.

I am not opposed to punitive tax rates on demonstrably unhealthy food products...but, the moment you look at this sentence, you can't help but wonder where this will end? Glasgow's fried Mars bars anyone? Fries with mayonaise anyone? Cake? The list of crap we eat and enjoy is pretty endless. FWIW, I recently had a fried Mars bar, because I wanted to know how this ur-Scottish culinary delight tastes. Well, it's gross. Tax it to the hilt as far as I care. Just kidding :). 

There's a serious point to this though: it seems to me that if one wanted to do this truly fairly one would have to balance the quality-of-life benefits folks derive from gobbling down junk food of any kind against the societal quality-of-life costs. People don't enjoy junk food only because they live in food deserts, or because they're poor and can't help it/don't know better (add your favourite assumption/prejudice about the kinds of people that eat junk food), etc. Many folks enjoy junk food because they enjoy the taste of it. Being a proper continental European I love my fries with mayo. We know our lifestyle choices ain't particularly healthy, and we don't care in the end. Health is only one value among many that make life worth living. It is a very important value, but it isn't uncontroversially on top of anyone's hierarchy of values. So, taking pleasure out of our lives (or making our pleasures more expensive by means of tax policies) requires sound justifications that go beyond pointing to health consequences. 

It seems to me that such taxes can probably be justified - and they might ultimately be a good idea. It should be interesting to see whether this experiment would result in the desirable health outcomes its proponents are hoping for. However, in a just society there should then be equal taxation for other products that are equally detrimental to our health. Guess one could quantify what kinds of damages what kinds of products cause and tax (or insure) accordingly. That is, provided the choices those make who indulge are reasonably their own and not choices determined by forces beyond their control (eg food deserts). 

Anyhow, guess I am just thinking aloud here. One worry I have is clearly to do with the question of where this will end. But then, in philosophy we know that slippery-slope arguments are typically terrible, unsustainable arguments, so I suspect reasonable, definsible lines can probably be drawn in the sand. How and where would you draw them? 

We've got to PAY for news - but how?

You're reading this blog on the web (and no, it's not news!), so I suspect you might be reading much of your news on the web. There's excellent sites serving our insatiable need for news, from the BBC site in the UK to the M&G in South Africa to tbe BMJs health sites, and so on and so forth. This shift from print media to the web has resulted in the death of many venerable newspapers. Many have been household names for a century, and suddenly they were gone. Their sales figures plummeted because people bought paper copies of the newspapers in ever lower numbers, advertising revenue migrated to where people go today for news, a vicious cycle from a newspaper's perspective. Many websites run advertisements to pay for their content. It has become clear by now, however, that large news organisations such as the San Francisco Chronicle, or the Los Angeles Times cannot survive on the advertising revenue derived from their websites. Excellent newspapers tho they are, they're on the brink of extinction.

I have got to be honest, I rarely buy print copies of newspapers these days anymore. Living in Canada, I have difficulty justifying shelling out cash for the local papers, the quality of most of them is plain inferior to what is available free of charge on the web elsewhere. It's also unclear whether they contribute to national debate as much as they used to (after all, web based media are also capable of achieving this feast).

However, when I look carefully at how I interact with internet based news organisations' sites, I notice that, truth be told, essentially I am a free-rider. The superb (to my mind unique in terms of quality) BBC site, for instance is paid for by UK based TV license payers (ie tax payers) who have no choice but to pay their annual fee to support the BBC. While I am grateful to them, truth be told, I should probably pay towards maintaining that great source of high-quality news content that this site is. Equally, I doubt the South Africa based Mail& Guardian makes money from its fairly comprehensive site. There I am, a reasonably well-off developed world dweller, sucking up free news content produced in the developing world (fair enough, South Africa isn't as poor as its townships suggest, but still, you get the drift). Equally, the millions of Jamaican expatriates that read the Jamaican Gleaner newspaper to find out what's going on 'at home' do not pay the paper's proprietor anything for using the news content provided there free of charge to them via the internet. Mind you, the paper sucks so badly that it would probably never succeed if it decided to charge its internet based readers, but who knows...

I can't help but think that sadly Rupert Murdoch is right-on when he tries to get people to pay for news content on the News Corporation's website. As it happens, in my world News Corporation companies do not produce news, they generate reactionary propaganda, so I won't frequent their 'news' websites anymore in the future than I have done in the past. It's bad enough that I can't prevent Fox 'news' flooding into my home thru my cable provider's pre-packaged content delivery. However, if the BBC ever decided to charge a nominal fee for access to its internet news sites, I would almost certainly pay up.

The only disadvantage I see of this is that once the commercial access walls have gone up, there will be so much less news available, because the content will once again become proprietory in nature. Still, to assume that somehow large news sites could survive simply based on advertising revenue seems naive. When - if ever - have you clicked thru to one of the advertisers' sites? I think I may have done so 10 or 20 times over the last decade...

Any views on this anyone? My main concern is not that one would have to pay, as I said, I think we should begin paying for news content currently provided free of charge on the web. No, my main concern is that once we start paying we will ironically also receive access to much less information than we currently have. That surely is a regressive step.

Sex work - good or bad or what?

This is one of those topics... you won't make friends, whatever your views. I just read an interesting piece on the BBC's website. They interview clients of sex workers in the UK. Three blokes are questioned who unashamedly regularly hire sex workers for their sexual (and possibly emotional) gratification. Their reasons are quite diverse, as one would expect. One guy seems to be a typical city high roller. He claims to have insufficient time for romantic involvement and is looking more or less for quick sexual release. Another guy says that he hasn't had sex with his wife for five years and he gets from sex workers what's missing in his marriage. Another one goes on about getting better sex from sex workers.

Well, first things first, guess this is one of those coming out type moments: I have not paid for sex myself. My main reason really is that I think there's no 'fun' in that. I am probably sufficiently vain that I would want someone to have sex with me because of me as opposed to because of my credit card. So, paying to my mind defeats a central purpose of having sex. Shows you how simple-minded I am. Clearly, however, people hold different views on this.

Secondly, my take on the ethics of sex tends to agree with the view that sex causes no particular moral problems, ie there is nothing special at all about sex. There are certain types of sexual activities that are bad because they translate into harm, eg non-consensual sex, probably sexual acts involving seriously young children, things like that. The wrongness of such acts is related to the harm they cause as opposed to their sexual nature. Some feminists have argued that rape doesn't constitute sex at all, because of the violent nature of such acts. I am not convinced of that, but that's neither here nor there for the purpose of this argument.

Thirdly, I cannot see how sex work is different to any other type of bonded work where we offer our bodies to people hiring us to perform particular tasks. Unless we have good reason to think that it would be wrong, for instance for my assistant to work for me based on agreed-upon conditions, we have no good reasons to think that it would be wrong for someone to work voluntarily and informedly as a sex worker who also offers his or her body on agreed-upon conditions to a person seeking to pay for such services. There does not seem to be an in-principle difference between people selling their bodies for sex for an agreed upon fee or people selling their bodies to produce cars for an agreed upon fee.

Fourth, the illegal nature of sex work in many countries has arguably led to more harm than good, because it forced sex workers into the underground, making them more vulnerable to harm, including rape, STIs, and the illegal industry that goes with this. Arguably one of the reasons for why people in the illegal business of trafficking women for sex work get away with it all too often is precisely that they can threaten the women with deportation or jail should the women opt to inform police, simply because they are/were in an illegal line of work.

Fifth, reading thru the comments posted on the BBC website, I was bemused to note this one: 'I found some of the comments quite shocking, especially the comment about demanding oral sex from a partner and not getting it. I'm sure most women wouldn't dream of visiting a prostitute when their male partner doesn't satisfy their fantasies or demands.
Cheryl Evans, Oldham, Greater Manchester' Little does Cheryl Evans know...

Sixth, of the three men interviewed by the BBC, only one would would seem to be reasonably in the clear, morally, namely our city high roller. The other guys are acting in ways that are morally questionable, not because they hired sex workers but because they are dishonest to their partners. Which takes me back to my point that there is nothing ever morally special about sexual activities. These guys acted wrongly because they cheated on their partners, not because they had sex with sex workers.

It seems to me that everyone would be better off if sex work was a legalized, regulated industry.