"In Government and Taxes We Trust"

Nanny State Shows Signs of Life

Poor old New Zealand is returning to the Dark Ages.  With the current Left Wing administration in power, all sorts of do-gooders and centralist planners have emerged from the woodwork like herds of hungry slaters and earwigs.  They sense an opportunity.  They have at last got a lever upon power.  The Left Wing is sympathetic to their concerns.  And the Left Wing believes in  government being omni-competent.  And the Left Wing want to make New Zealand a perfect society.  

The latest deal is the looming imposition of a sugar tax.  You know--one of those things imposed for our own good.  We are obtuse and ignorant people.  Our betters will guide our behaviour into better paths by means of taxing what is "bad" and subsidizing what is "good".

Dr Eric Crampton gives us the skinny on the ineffectual outcome of sugar taxes and their ilk.

To begin with, sugar taxes are offensive. They presume that some government official knows better than you about what food choices are best for you.  And when we think about how they're generally aimed at things like soda rather than expensive coffee drinks, they're also deeply classist.  They presume poor people are too dumb to make the 'right' choices and must be guided by their betters.

But even if you were OK with that, there's another problem.   Should it be taxed?  Sugar taxes of 10 or 20 per cent – the range usually advocated – simply do not affect consumption very much. [Stuff]

There is a precedent in New Zealand--taxes on tobacco in order (eventually) to outlaw tobacco.  This mindset has created the precedent for all sorts of taxes to direct and control human behaviour.  But Crampton is not impressed:

Everybody talks about how tobacco taxes have cut tobacco consumption, but let's be realistic.  The tax on a single cigarette stick is $0.83. The cheapest cigarettes I can find online are Easy Reds, at $19.90 for a pack of 20.  Each of those then has 17 cents of tobacco, and 83 cents of excise. That isn't a 10 or 20 per cent tax.  Even if the Government taxed sugar as heavily as it taxes tobacco, people could just switch to other forms of junk food.

And, we might add, the huge taxes upon tobacco have resulted in an unintended terrible consequence: a crime wave which has terrorized innocent people.  Tobacco is now so expensive it has become a valuable commodity in its own right.  The gangs prey at will upon innocent and defenceless shopkeepers in corner convenience stores who sell the stuff.  Ah, but it's all in a good cause.  You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs--which, in this case, happen to be Indian shopkeepers.  [We fear the lack of concern for these folk borders on institutional racism.]

If the government were to tax sugar as heavily as tobacco there is another problem besides a sharp increase in violent crime:

Until vaping, if you wanted nicotine, you had to buy cigarettes.  But there are all kinds of tasty and potentially unhealthy things out there that people could shift to if there were a tax on sugar.  The effects of tax on health would then be much smaller than you might think from a naive estimation from any reduction in sugar consumption. If people flip from chocolate bars to crisps, are they really that much healthier?  Unsurprisingly, in the real world, sugar taxes have not done much to improve health.  But don't just take my word for it.

The consensus by those who have studied the actual of sugar taxes is that they are ineffectual:

The Ministry of Health commissioned the NZIER (New Zealand Institute of Economic Research) to review the literature on sugar taxes around the world.  NZIER found little effect of sugar taxes on consumption, and no evidence of health benefits.

And documents released to the New Zealand Initiative by the Ministry of Health showed that the ministry had reached a very similar conclusion about sugar taxes, advising the minister that there is "insufficient evidence that a sugar tax would be effective in reducing obesity".  The ministry also warned that the quality of evidence presented in favour of sugar taxes "is a major concern". All of that means that, even if sugar taxes were easy to implement (and they are far from easy to implement), there would still be no good reason to do it.

It is time that public health activists simply admitted that they got this one wrong and left us alone.

Sadly, this is not likely.  Our Leftist government has a deep belief in the omnicompetence of government rules, regulations, laws, and money to re-create the Garden of Eden.  Evidence to the contrary will not withstand such purblind faith.