Most of you have read of the OMA's recent call for taxes on and scary-labelling of bad food, to avoid - according to the OMA president - the overwhelming of our health-care system.
It is not so hard to find economists these days who will argue in favor of all sorts of taxes designed to modify behavior, on the grounds that this works better than most alternatives. Leaving aside the philosophical question of when it permissible for governments to try to alter our behavior (speeding, yes, reading, no, presumably - but after that...?), one is led to ask; are the OMA's suggestions good ones on purely instrumental grounds?
The first attached reading includes a brief CBC article on the OMA proposal in case you haven't already seen it, followed by an editorial from The Globe arguing against the OMA proposal. My shock at The Globe and Mail taking such a libertarian stand was somewhat reduced when I started reading the comments from Globe readers, who almost uniformly wrote that the editorial writer was an idiot and probably a lackey of the soda pop industry; now that's The Globe I know. However, one commenter actually put forward a remarkably concise and considered argument against the OMA proposal, and that is pasted in after the editorial. If one is to make distributional arguments in this matter, this one seems like a winner to me, if not to Globe readers generally.
However, what may be the central scientific issue in all this is best displayed in the second reading, in which the sad state of health in Glasgow, Scotland is detailed - along with the seeming impossibility of determining why those Glaswegians are so damnably unhealthy. It seems that every explanation advanced is easily shot down, including any related to diet.
Maybe the reasons for bad health outcomes are harder to figure out than the OMA knows.
See you at the FUBar.
