Eminently logical. The question is what right does the government have to penalize a person for drinking soda, and the answer is "none whatsoever."
1) In countries where health costs are at least partly absorbed by everyone, then it does have a right.
2) In the case of the US, the answer would be what right does the govt have to subsidy soda drinks (due to corn syrup, the main ingredient):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/United_S...
(note how there are no subsidies for fruit or veggies)
2) The fact that a government does one thing wrong does not mean that it somehow gains the right to commit more wrongs.
2) Many, myself included, disagree that the government is commiting a wrong by penalizing sodas.
It isn't a slippery slope so much as a discussion we have as a people.
After all, there's very little debate over how much right the government has to nanny-state us with all these traffic lights and traffic lanes (where in the constitution does it say that the government can tell ME where and when I can drive my car??), because we're generally OK with that kind of government-dictated restriction of freedom to move.
I worry that this sort of thinking might end up like the Commerce Clause[1]. Just as there are many actions that affect interstate commerce, there are many behaviors that affect life expectancy. Using that justification to allow the government to imprison or tax people seems (to me, at least) a recipe for disaster.
Let me be more concrete: If you're going to use that argument to tax soda, you should also be in favor of taxing things that cause more harm to public health than soda. Should we tax people for being sedentary? Should we tax people for being old? Should we tax obesity? These are the major costs for health care. Soda is a rounding error.
If you say "let's just tax fat/old/disabled people because they cost more so they should pay for it", that's an equity argument.
If you say "let's tax fat people because by doing so you create incentives for being less fat", that's an efficiency argument.
So it all depends on whether the tax has an effect or not (which is what the article is about) :)
Such policy might include tax breaks for exercises, taxes on cigarettes, soda, etc. Tax subsidies for veggies, etc. Obviously solid evidence is needed before it is initiated.
There could be philosophical arguments that the government should not interfere with their citizens' lives. But this is more about charging the true (future) costs of actions, like carbon tax, rather than dictating behaviors.
This could obviously be deemed a bit of a slippery slope fallacy, but I'd argue the above is probably more beneficial than taxing my soda if you truly want to reduce healthcare costs by having healthier individuals. But, who wants to go that far?
As for the bedroom thing, this is a bad kind of slippery slope argument (not all slippery slope arguments are fallacies). It's ignoring the fact that penalizing soda is not a binary +health/-health decision but a complex tradeoff that includes the magnitude of expected gains and the probable sentiment of the public.
Although hard to imagine, if we can somehow develop a system to charge people more for unsafe sex while perfectly anonymizing it, I do not see how it would be different from carbon tax in principle.
Let's be clear on this issue because the advocates of nudging always seem to rationalize, minimize, evade and deny the fact that govt nudging occurs, ultimately, at the point of a gun.
This is not how civilized people live and, no, it is not rational. In fact, it is the very negation of rationality regardless of any real or imagined economic, financial or health benefits that accrue to the nudgers or the nudgees.
No, that isn't it. That's silly and doesn't contribute anything of substance to this discussion.
Tell me, what happens if you don't go along with govt nudges? Don't they fine you or sanction you in someway? And if you continue on this path, refuse to pay your fines and continue to disobey what happens? A man with a gun will come and take you to jail. It is that simple.
Invoking the violent image of "a man with a gun" is a childish way to make the down-to-earth subject of tax collection into an emotional, fear-based thing.
QED
Take gasoline. Of course cheap fuel seems like it's in my best interest because it means I pay less for travel. Still, I want the carbon tax badly because I understand that if we don't start accounting for the emissions, we're going to cook the planet in few decades.
Or a different example - traffic lights and signs. People bitch about the timings all the time because they see a red light often when driving through their area, without stopping to consider that they're being optimized to give optimal traffic throughout half of the city.
> Why can't it be that they're making the choices they want to make?
Just because they want to make a choice, doesn't mean it's not stupid-ass choice. One could argue for the right to be stupid, but I draw the line at the point where stupidity becomes an externality.
That said, one interesting thing I heard about the really poor (at least in India) is that they'll spend a third of their income on junk --as it gives them a "little pleasure" to endure the day. So, this has the potential to be a tax unintentionally skewed against poor people.