Putting Sugary Soda Out of Reach
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I also like that they lead with an image of Coke Zero, which has no sugar nor calories, and happens to be my drink of choice. But I made that choice myself, without my employer or government telling me I had to.
"I want free/subsidised healthcare" and "I want to gradually erode my health without realising it OR incredibly cheaply OR because in helpless to not do so" are normally incompatible.
If someone says that they would prefer it if the state lowered taxes rather than subsidizing healthcare, then healthcare gets subsidized anyway, and then soda gets regulated and that same person objects, it seems a bit disingenuous for the government to then argue that it is entitled to regulate soda because it's paying for that person's healthcare.
* People having children (more health visits and possible complications)
* Those who drive (more accidents versus public transport)
* Those living further south (more sunshine -> more skin cancer)
* People with hobbies like rock climbing (more likely to get injured)
* People who consume alcohol (more likely to get health issues)
* People with pre-existing conditions
I'm sure there are many many more examples where individuals do things that put them at greater risk of some health concerns versus other groups.
My opinion is that there are certain things that should be regulated, or banned in many cases, because doing so would help our society as a whole.
Heroin hurts the individual using, so it should be warned against but not criminalized. You can't stop self harm by inflicting harm on the perpetrator. See also the regulation of marijuana which is a huge waste of money and only creates more problems than it solves. Compare with suicide prevention.
Vaccines protect the population as a whole through herd immunity, so are different from your other examples.
You could also ague that anything that lowers the severity of traffic accidents lessens the work need by police and clean up crews. Effectively protecting them as working roadside can be a risky job.
Seat belts protect other people from you. If you are driving at street speeds and have to make a sudden sharp turn to evade something, such as a deer or child or pet that has darted into the road, you are much more likely to lose control if you are not wearing a seat belt due to centrifugal forces moving you away from your normal position upright and in front of the steering wheel.
This is sweetened with sucralose. In a recent study, fruit flies fed sucralose consumed more total calories than those fed sugar:
http://abc.net.au/news/2016-07-13/research-shows-artificial-...
Fruit juices have vitamins and minerals that soda does not. With that said, there's also a huge difference between the old herbal beverages (Cocaine & kola nut flavorings, "root beer", 21 natural plant flavors, etc), and modern artificially-colored and artificially-flavored concoctions.
I have a can in front of me, it is sweetened with Acesulfame Potassium and Aspartame.
> In a recent study, fruit flies fed sucralose consumed more total calories than those fed sugar.
I'm not a fruit fly, and everything is a trade off. If this has been widely proven in human trials it'd be one thing.
> Fruit juices have vitamins and minerals that soda does not.
Vitamins and minerals are available in more than just fruit.
> artificially-colored and artificially-flavored
The Coke Zero in front of me has no artificial flavors listed, but is "caramel colored", so maybe that's artificial. Artificial doesn't inherently mean "bad for you".
But here's a handful from the first page of Google search results:
http://time.com/103898/5-juices-with-more-sugar-than-soda/
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/nov/11/childre...
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/06/09/319230765/fru...
But don't worry, they've got "NO SUGAR ADDED" printed right there on the label.
Fruits tend to have a lot of sugar and when you juice / concentrate them it only makes things worse on that front.
(Coke Zero is also my first choice and I didn't know it came in Cherry.)
This calls to mind "Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness"[0]. It discusses, in part, setting up decisions and choices so that the default choice is in the best interest of the decider. (It's been a while since I read it. Improvements on my sentence-long summary welcome :) They also discuss what they term "liberal paternalism".[1] Good, interesting stuff if this are interests you.
This seems in line with the decision UCSF made. You still have the choice to drink sugary soda. They're just not going to make it as easily available.
Where this line is drawn is often going to be contentious. That said, there's always going to be some sort of line, right? Why this is being called into question now is that something is changing. At some point in the past, soda machines weren't on campus. Putting them on campus likely didn't have this same issue. But it did change the environment, and opened up more choice. What choices should be made available? All legal ones? All healthy ones? I think it's an interesting and valid question, one that needs to take into account both the individual and the community as a whole.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_(book)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_paternalism
If you choose to down vote, I'd appreciate it if you'd also take the time to reply in a comment. I'm interested in hearing what you think!
Why is it when a public org makes a decision on your behalf it is paternalism, but when a company decides to put 10-15 teaspoons of sugar in almost every drink you have access to, it is choice?
So the simple answer to your question is that your relationship to government is not voluntary and is backed by the the use of force. If the government forbids something from being sold you have no legal recourse beyond leaving the jurisdiction.
If a company makes a change that is unwelcome, the market readily adapts to providing alternative solutions that are more welcomed by the market.
The relationship you have with a corporation can easily be replaced unlike the relationship you have with your government.
Lots of policy conundrums with public schools disappear when you consider the same situation at a private school: religious content, political philosophy, gender segregation, choice of beverages to provide, and so on. That isn't to say that policy choices don't have pros and cons, just that in a private entity the policy choices are un-complicated by constitutional concerns or by concerns about them being universally applied (to all public schools, for example).
That was exactly my (counter)point. Your argument is theoretical, but in practice often the relationship with a company is as difficult to change as with government.
The example raised of sugary drinks, in practice, due to aggressive marketing and positioning meant that sugary drinks were the only option in most places I lived for quite some time (school, public places, fast food, work) unless you had access to a tap. (The bottling of water in the last few years has made a dent in that stranglehold.) Clearly the market can be easily manipulated at least in the short term, with advertising, market monopolisation, lies from sugar industry lobbyists..
"just that in a private entity the policy choices are un-complicated by constitutional concerns or by concerns about them being universally applied"
Arguable. Private policy choices, if economically successful create internal feedback effects and spread. (Bear in mind economics does not follow peoples values, wishes or best interests.. at best it follows their desires, and not even always). But even otherwise, it matters little if you are one of the unfortunate kids attending that school with skewed religious / political content.
Public health is also a big factor in society, even economically, so your argument below about vaccines does apply to healthy eating as well.
Big Soda isn't playing fair when it implies Big Bacon is the Bad Guy.
Better yet, do you sit for much of the day?
If so, then yes, it might make sense for me to intervene.
(just to be clear, we're talking about the OP's statement here, not sugary drinks)
Conversely, that is why socialism inherently limits freedom. As soon as I am responsible for your "needs" (health, food, childcare), I will start demanding that you make choices I feel are good ones (good diet, productive career so you can provide for yourself, good family planning choices, etc.).
Would that be a job that circumstantially for all intents and purposes requires you to sit down for 8+ hours a day. Is that a poor choice? Would that take away my healthcare subsidy?
Is playing American Football, or kickboxing a similarly poor choice?
Would - and here's where I get facetious in a hope of highlighting the issue with the way you raise your choices/free healthcare point - knowingly continuing the pregnancy of a child with Downs Syndrome be regarded as a poor choice?
Finally, who decides?
This turns ordinary differences of opinion or culture into political fights.
If Sally doesn't have to pay for Joe's poor choices, Joe can figure out for himself what he feels is best, and that's called freedom.
Smoking cigarettes.
If the health care costs keep going up, and/or they start rationing/queueing, that may have a big enough impact on you that you change your opinion.
Even if you keep your opinion, when you vote for socialism you are voting to force everyone to pay for Joe's poor choices. They might not be so generous.
If you want to just pay into a no-strings-attached social fund, and not force everyone else, that would preserve freedom.
Sometimes the government gets it wrong, of course: prohibition, pot, ...
I don't know where sugary drinks fall on this scale, but they're definitely on it.
So that one should probably be under your "gets it wrong" category.
> Horrifically stupid wingnuts and experts for hire will sometimes imply that a supposed worldwide ban on DDT has killed millions of people by giving them malaria or some other mosquito-borne disease, and that Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring was responsible for the alleged ban. The myth seems to have originated from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and from libertarian Roger Bate (and is promoted by his organization Africa Fighting Malaria).
> Carson devoted some of her book into weighing the pros and cons of DDT use,[4] but her findings did not lead to a global ban. DDT got banned in dozens of countries, but there was (and still is) no global ban on DDT; only agricultural use is almost globally banned. Places with deadly mosquito-borne illnesses still use DDT, and in some places excessive use has led to the development of DDT-resistant mosquitoes.[5][6] In fact, the drastic reduction of DDT use in agriculture delayed the onset of resistance in mosquitoes.
> Not only is DDT still approved by the WHO for use against malaria (in indoor residual spraying,[wp] which is the spraying of walls of a home so a mosquito landing after it bites should get a fatal dose), but the Persistent Organic Pollutants Treaty (POPs) has a special clause for DDT.[7] Any nation may endorse the treaty calling for an end to DDT; but any nation may also use DDT at any time, for severe health reasons, by essentially writing a letter to WHO saying, "We have a health problem we think DDT may be useful to combat, so we're going to use DDT."[8]
Or from https://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2014/05/30/yes-malaria-is-s... :
> 4. DDT was banned ONLY for agriculture use in the U.S. It was banned in a few European nations. [Addition, December 30, 2014: In fact, the U.S. action against DDT by EPA specifically called for DDT use in any fight against a vector borne disease, like malaria.]
> 5. DDT has never been banned in Africa or Asia.
Or from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Convention_on_Persis... :
> [The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants] specifically permits the public health use of DDT for the control of mosquitoes (the malaria vector).
Let's see what you got here because I think you're being naive.
>lead paint
That causes harm to everyone both directly (health risks) and indirectly (disposal costs). So the ban on lead paint was a benefit for us all.
>DDT
Ditto.
>opioids
Nope, they're regulated. Morphine is a form of them.
>microbeads
This is the same as the DDT and lead paint items. Common risk but indirectly through how they harm fish stock which are part of the food web that makes the nitrogen cycle possible.
>antibacterial soaps
Yet again, indirect harm to all.
I've yet to discern a pattern in your argument that shows where sugary sodas are bad. Obesity sucks, I'm a big fat blob here so I know the damage it does personally (bad back and probably going to get heart disease at this rate). What you should notice that health issues like this are covered under insurance and sodas can be hit with a sin tax to cover additional costs. Trying to go out of our way to ban stuff like this is misplaced as the individual consumer won't ever be able to cover the cost. Producers of such goods can but since our tax code is a mess it's a miracle we get any taxes from them. So if you want to really hit who is doing harm it would be the producers of such goods. From sodas to cars every good comes with a part of it's risks (that harms) socialized but it's profits privatized. That means we should tax firms to cover those negative externalities and not individuals who consume them.
I think your phrase "protects us from ourselves" is apt. I struggle a bit with the "limited agency" aspect of it as it sounds like it could have negative connotations, though it's accurate in a strict sense.
I think this is related to us looking out for each other. Where's the line between limiting someone's agency in some malicious sense and honestly trying to be a good person? Can we look out for people we don't know personally? How does this work when we're looking out for the community as a whole?
I think this is a good question. If you choose to down vote, I'd appreciate it if you'd also take the time to reply in a comment.