The efforts, spurred by Mayor Bloomberg, to ban large cans of drinks deemed too sugary have been much in the news lately; and a peculiar point in the mayor's defense of this measure is highly relevant to Laurence Vance's excellent book. What struck me as odd in the mayor's comments was that he confined his defense to pointing out the dangers to health posed by the drinks he wished to ban, along with the attendant monetary costs that illnesses that resulted from consuming these drinks might impose.
It never seemed to occur to Mayor Bloomberg that whether an individual decides to consume a harmful substance ought not to come under governmental supervision. The decision is the person's alone to make. What was odd about the mayor's comments was not so much that he rejected this view, but rather that he did not deem it worthy of mention. State paternalism for him required no defense.
As Vance reminds us, it is not only libertarians who reject paternalism. To the contrary, the view that the state can address only acts directed against others, not ones that affect immediately just an individual himself, is integral to the classical-liberal tradition. It received its canonical statement from John Stuart Mill: CONTINUE READING
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