The ongoing debate at Cato Unbound on soft paternalism has focused a lot on the issue of slippery slopes. There are two directions one can slide down a slippery slope: an increasing scope of paternalism, and an increasing degree of paternalism. The danger of the former is captured in Glen Whitman’s example of smoking. First they banned it on airplanes, then it was bars and restaurants, and now it is increasingly in all public places.
The other slippery slope occurs when the presence of paternalism in area A makes it more likely in area B. This type of slippery slope is evident in the spread of regulation from sugar, which is becoming more popular, to salt, which is on the horizon:
Citing 40 years of failed efforts to voluntarily reduce the amount of salt in food, an advisory panel Tuesday recommended that the government regulate sodium for the first time… The proposals outlined by the Institute of Medicine envision step-by-step efforts that would both ratchet back Americans’ desire for salt and mandate the maximum amount that could be added to various types of foods.
The proposed policy is for the FDA to begin setting a gradually decreasing maximum amount of sodium that could be legally added to foods and beverages. The level of regulation and control of individual choices that proponents sound comfortable with is really ridiculous to me:
“It must be done very thoughtfully,” said panel chair Henney, a former FDA commissioner and now a medical professor at the University of Cincinnati. Pickles, for instance, “are very high in salt content but are not eaten that often,” she said, “so what you get with pickles might be quite different than something that is eaten more frequently, like bread, or cereal.”
Can I please spend a month with this woman first, checking the label of everything she eats and granting or denying her permission to eat it? Seriously though, if this is not evidence that there is a slippery slope out there begging for us to slide down it, then I don’t know what is.
I hope that most people would consider the letting the FDA deciding how much salt we can have an egregious encroachment into personal freedom, but I fear that the growing presence of sugar taxes has warmed people up for this. The general unpopularity of the proposed Philadelphia sugary drink tax, however, does provide me with some optimism.
Overall, I’m really curious to see what the next absurd thing will be that someone tries regulate. Food spiciness? Temperature? How many people suffer from a burned mouth every year? It’s clearly market failure and information problem, as well as evidence of consumer irrationality and potentially time varying preferences, as surely nobody would choose to burn their mouths. And can we do something about the scourge of brain freeze the nation is facing? I’d like to see a minimum temperature and size of milk shakes. Or maybe we can just provide a “nudge” by mandating narrower straws. Or on the more deadly side, how many people are killed by tired drivers every year? Can we get a mandatory nap-time policy to fix this?
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Thursday ~ April 22nd, 2010 at 5:52 pm
They came first for the sugar, then they came for the salt…, ctd. « Modeled Behavior
[...] in Just Wow, Science, obesity | by Adam Ozimek A friend writes: I’m really glad you posted that piece on paternalism and salt in food. This strikes a personal chord with me, as you could imagine. [...]
Friday ~ April 23rd, 2010 at 8:50 am
jazzbumpa
This is an epic – and you’ll have to convince me that it’s not willful, it you even care – failure to see the point.
1) Where does this slippery slope lead? To fewer instances of high blood pressure, ergo fewer heart attacks and strokes. Wow – that’s tragic!
2) Nobody is impinging on your freedom to use salt. Have they come for your salt shaker? Controlling the Na content of packaged products, in fact gives you MORE freedom to make your own sodium decisions, since the food stuff OVER THE CONTENT OF WHICH YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO CONTROL will have a LOWER sodium content. Do the math, and add salt to taste.
3) Re smoking: Nobody has ever said you can’t smoke in the privacy of your own home, or in a variety of open air venues. Smoking bans give non-smokers the freedom to not be exposed to smokers’ effluents.
Remember the old argument that your freedom to swing your arms ends at some distance from my nose?
If that makes no sense to you, then consider that I move my bowels regularly, but I almost never do it in your office.
4) Slippery Slope arguments are inherently fallacious.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/slippery-slope.html
For shame.
Really.
Tsk, tsk.
Cheers!
JzB
Friday ~ April 23rd, 2010 at 7:14 pm
Adam Ozimek
I’m sort of begrudgingly replying to this comment at all because, quite frankly, your demonstrated ability wildly misunderstand the simple concepts in my original post suggest to me that you’re going to have the same problem with whatever I say in response. Nevertheless…
“1) Where does this slippery slope lead? To fewer instances of high blood pressure, ergo fewer heart attacks and strokes. Wow – that’s tragic!”
Slippery slopes from here could be regulating a minimum amount of vitamins, or a maximum amount of fat, or regulating the amount of anything that appears on the food label. I assumed, apparently incorrectly, that examples like these would be trivially obvious to everyone, and so unnecessary for me to discuss.
“2) Nobody is impinging on your freedom to use salt. Have they come for your salt shaker? Controlling the Na content of packaged products, in fact gives you MORE freedom to make your own sodium decisions, since the food stuff OVER THE CONTENT OF WHICH YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO CONTROL will have a LOWER sodium content. Do the math, and add salt to taste.”
This is like arguing that if the government made it illegal to sell cars with engines in them it would increase your freedom because you get to choose which kind of engine you put it in it. This is absurd.
Per your smoking claim, I will quote Glen Whitman to whom I originally referenced:
“The relationship between a bar owner, his employees, and his customers is a voluntary transaction on private property. If a bar owner allows smoking, that is part of the environment I consent to by visiting his bar; if I don’t like it, I can go elsewhere. By intervening, the state prohibits employees and customers from voluntarily accepting certain kinds of working conditions.”
I can understand limits in some public places, but in many open air public places with a lot of room and where smoking is illegal the externality argument is nonsense.
And finally, from your link:
“The Slippery Slope is a fallacy in which a person asserts that some event must inevitably follow from another without any argument for the inevitability of the event in question.”
The entire point of my post was that this salt regulation was evidence evidence of a slippery slope, so to say that I have argued for a slippery slope “without any argument” is false… and annoying. Furthermore, I’m making a probabilistic statement, not a deductive proof about what MUST occur.
Quite frankly I am annoyed at having to respond to such sophomoric arguments. The only reason I do so is to encourage you to avoid making poorly thought out and condescendingly written assertions here in the future, and hopefully encourage you to read more closely and think harder about what I write before you respond.
Sunday ~ April 25th, 2010 at 12:22 am
jazzbumpa
Geeze. Remind me to never play “can you out-condescend this” with you again.
Take another look at the words you quoted from my link. See the words “argument for inevitability?” Sorry, a probabilistic statement does not qualify. And doesn’t the idea of a minimum vitamin content in, frex., potato chips, or maximum fat in butter seem rather remote, probabilistically?
Your salt vis-a-vis car analogy is not only not well thought out, it is a willfull misunderstanding of what I said. The point – or a least A point – is that protecting your right to consume salt is the central issue. Otherwise what does your title mean?
The idea of prohibiting selling cars without engines might be fanciful, but what does it have to do with the salt content of pickles? If you want more salt in your food, you can add it with small expense and less effort. Adding an engine is difficult, expensive, and requires special skills and equipment.
There are some foods that require salt – pickles for example. Others that either don’t need it or only need a little have a lot. This gives the producer some benefits, but not so much the consumer.
The point here is that once the salt has been put in, you can’t take it out again. And limiting the salt content of a packaged product imposes limits on the manufacturer, but does not impinge on your freedom. And if your freedom to consume isn’t what you were talking about, then I did wildly misunderstand.
Re smoking: The slippery slope argument, if you want to think of it that way, from airplanes to bars to restaurants has some merit. Extending to open air places doesn’t. But it is pretty irrelevant to the question of salt content in foods. You can chose to smoke. You can’t chose to eat.
The argument about being easily able to chose other employment is totally invalid in the current economic environment. A drinker can chose a different bar or just stay home. A person needing a job has no such flexibility. The employer-employee relationship is highly asymetric.
As for annoying you – well, I can’t apologize, because your contention of a slippery slope remains nothing more than a naked assertion. Salt regulation is a slippery slope because — because you said it is.
Be annoyed all you like. And feel free to ignore me in the future if that makes your life any more pleasant. But if you’re going to convince me that my arguments are sophomoric and poorly thought out, then you are going to have to do better than naked assertions and slippery slope fallacies that you deny are slippery slope fallacies.
Closer reading and harder thinking wouldn’t hurt either.
Cheers!
JzB
Sunday ~ April 25th, 2010 at 11:38 pm
Guy
My problem with seeing salt regulation as a noteworthy infringement on liberty is that it seems to me that most people, most of the time, do not choose to have X amount of salt on their food. They do not think about it at all – they just buy whatever’s on the menu. So this kind of regulation is more about changing the default than it is about restricting anyone’s choice.
And in a world where most people simply accept defaults in many areas and are not really interested in informing themselves to the level necessary to make a decision otherwise (and often not irrationally so: life is complicated and time is limited, so it makes a lot of sense to just accept defaults), it seems reasonable to have the default be the healthier option (i.e., less salt). Those who want to deviate from that default can do so by adding salt.
The car without the engine doesn’t work, and it would indeed be problematic if these regulations made certain kinds of food impossible, but I suspect most food tastes just fine with lowered salt content.
In short: this is only restricting choice to the extent that people actually care about how much salt is in their food.
Monday ~ April 26th, 2010 at 7:42 am
Eating Salt ≠ Smoking « Microfinanceblog
[...] smoking | Leave a Comment At Modeled Behavior, Adam Ozimek rightly points out that government regulation of salt content in food as proposed by the Institute of Medicine represents a terrible infringement on [...]
Monday ~ April 26th, 2010 at 12:33 pm
Martha Z
Actually, I see this regulation as finally giving me some choice. As a person who fights a family tendency to high blood pressure, I spend a great deal of time searching for a low sodium version of a product to no avail. I do most of my cooking from scratch and find even basic ingrediants like can tomatoes to be loaded with salt. Sliced turkey and chicken for sandwiches, poisen to me, too much salt.
My brother thought as you so, his right to smoke and dump salt on his food complaining “I feel so bad, what should I do? He continued to smoke and use salt until the day his heart stopped.
Tuesday ~ October 26th, 2010 at 7:43 am
Scientists against salt regulation « Modeled Behavior
[...] can find my previous coverage of salt regulation here, here, here, here, here, [...]