Do You Own Your Body?

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Addiction to junk food is not nearly as strong as a heroin addiction. Look, this is a very simple economic argument. The demand for junk food is not perfectly inelastic, and in fact is probably more elastic than the demand for other things such as healthcare and gasoline. Therefore a price increase (which could be brought about by a tax hike) would result in decreased consumption. An extra dollar slapped on to the price of burgers or doughnuts would cause people to buy less of them.

I think that the question uses the wrong verb.

At Common Law there is no property in a human body. There are numerous public policy reasons why this is so, but the issue remains that it is improper to speak of "ownership" of that which is not property.

The question is properly control: do you control your own body. In Canada, that legal question is posed through the Charter guarantee of "life, liberty and security of the person."

I do not own my body. Only when parts of it are separated from my body does any proprietary interest arise. But I do control my body, and I have the legal freedom to exercise that control in the face of all attempts by government to the contrary, except for those that are "demonstrably justifiable in a free and democratic society" (i.e. infringements that are saved by section 1).

Allow me to point out what part of the article in particular caught my attention:

This little nugget is actually my primary motivation for wariness of government healthcare programs, right up there with cost and inefficiency. I actually don't have a problem with using tax money to help the sick, what I have a real problem with is then using that as a back-door justification for controls on personal behavior. Suddenly, the state has a financial interest in such personal matters as whether or not I choose to smoke, exercise, what I want to eat, and a myriad of other things that to my mind they should have no business in whatsoever. You can certainly see this effect in Canada and the UK, where I believe the milder end of the behavior modification scheme is called "nudging". From a purely personal health standpoint, I probably should eat healthier, exercise more, and smoke less, but those should be my choices to make, not those of some bureaucrat trying to save a buck.

It is true you have no legal right to sell your body, but you do have a legal right to sell, rent or dispose of our time and energy as you see fit. O.K. , you can't sell yourself, but you can rent yourself. In fact that is what a worker does. He rents himself out by the hour, the day, the week, the month.

ruveyn

F*ck em.

Subsidies ruin everything.

Anyway, I just think that cows should be given grass to eat and not corn syrup. There is a lot of scientific reasons to believe that it is a dumb idea to give them corn syrup instead of grass just to keep the prices artificially low.

Antibiotics are also a no-no for cows that are not sick. Unless their intention is to create super bacteria.

I am a big eater, and I would hate any sort of restriction on consumers to consume stuff. But subsidies and also approaches that keep prices artificially low are as hurtful if not more.

There is a general societal interest in the actions of individuals. A healthier individual will be more productive and contribute more to society. The sticky questions are the correct channel for society to seek its own interests over individual desires (should it be done by government policy or outside government), and how far can society go in pushing against what an individual member wants? To come up with an example of non-governmental action here, let's say I own a business, and I refuse to hire anyone in poor health or with poor health habits. All of my employees must maintain a healthy weight, work out regularly, and are prohibited from smoking, even if they do it at home and it doesn't interfere with their work at all. I push other businessmen to enact similar policies. Is this acceptable?

The problem ends up being the efforts to set up complicated tax structures with the goals of manipulating behavior. Not only does this add to complexity, but it has the additional perception of being overly manipulative. While ruveyn's answer on the subsidies is hard to implement, it also looks less like an effort to exercise power over people and is simpler.

The problem is that in the US, a pigovian tax for health reasons will tend to not make sense in the vast majority of cases. In order to justify a pigovian tax, my health behavior has to impose a cost on outside actors, so that way the tax acts to internalize my externality. In fact, I think the real justification is often not actually pigovian at all, but rather just as a social control.

Even further, given all of the ways that an individual can eat unhealthily, and all of the healthy individuals who can eat unhealthy foods, wouldn't it be more direct to simply place a tax on body weight? I mean, it may be difficult to determine all of the ways that an individual can have unhealthy eating, and many tax ideas do not work simply because of substitutions of one unhealthy food for another.

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 31 Jul 2011, 1:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

The term "social engineering" doesn't refer to the maintenance of pre-existing norms, but rather the "engineering" of the structure of society. So, your claim that basic notions are social engineering is wrong. Social engineering has to involve engineering, it can't be maintenance work, regardless of how intrusive this maintenance work is. (Note: on this basis, one could actually argue that certain libertarian schemes are also social engineering, and it would be correct)

I love what a absolutist, essential line you try to draw in the sand here. No, "some bureaucrat" isn't forcing you directly to stop doing something, I you really value clugging your arterries that much, then you can still do that, you'll just have to pay an extra 5%. And I don't know how cheap junk food is in the US, but Pigovian taxes aren't really that common outside of cigarettes and alcohol (all booze in Manitoba is sold by the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission, which sets the price). Besides, natural rights libertarians should be all over them, as they don't "tax success". While I eat a bit too much, or perhaps a lot too much junkfood, probably at least partially related to the fact my father feed a lot of fast-food to me as a child because it's harder to buy and prepare healthy meals at 15K an year, I wouldn't mind a 5% or 8% tax on unhealthy foods (especially if the revenues were used to subsidize healthier items).

And in terms of society's vested interest in healthy eating, even if healthcare is completely private, the fact that certain people are unhealthier and hence probably are more prone to sickness EFFECTS US ALL anyway. There is no line you can draw representing some isolated individual and fiscal policy that merely influences the incentive structure is probably one of the LEAST INSTRUSIVE ways public policy can address health issues.

Having less healthy population DOES affect us all, whether we pay for healthcare or not. The cultivation of illnesses is one way.

Well, the issue with the non-governmental action example is that this mechanism will involve the trade-offs and the desires of all of the actors in a more sensible manner. When a business-man sets a labor policy, he has to either be willing to make the sacrifices to get what he wants from the population, or he has to give in his demands of his hires and employees. As well, he has competitors who often will be willing to take other measures, if his measure isn't actually a good idea. A governmental policy usually doesn't have these feedback mechanisms, and it doesn't have competition. So, do I think the single business-man idea is acceptable? Yes. If we lived in some strange panarchy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panarchism , would I think the government promoting this so problematic? No. But, the difference is that government has an effective monopoly of force and poor feedback mechanisms that no other agent in society has, and this does make a significant difference in any notion of relating to that body.

I don't really buy this. A lot of law enforcement is trying to internalize these values into certain subcultures (that of certain criminals and gang networks) that don't accept them. This is trying to change a segment of society, explicitly trying to bring it's values into the mainstream.

"The application of sociological principles to specific social problems"

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=soc ... 19&bih=652

A fair amount of law enforcement does rely on sociological (or at least pop sociology) ideas to get criminals in line.

And the sense I always get out of the term "social engineering" is that they're refering to government actions directed at changing the behaviours of individuals. Just because respect of private property is a behaviour right-libertarians like doesn't mean state actions to ensure it are any less manipulative.

M_P, the Pigovian tax depends on internalizing an externality. You have not given a very good case for a significant externality. An increase in the incidence of heart disease isn't an externality as this risk exists within pre-existing arrangements. An increase in the flu might be, but even then, it's a minor one in the overall scheme of things that doesn't justify larger policy changes, and if anything just would entail a slightly higher flu shot subsidy.

"Pigovian tax" isn't just a slogan to punish random behaviors that you happen to dislike. There has to be a clear case that these behaviors have a cost on people who are not in any extended economic agreement with the person engaged in these behaviors. A contagious disease would entail externalities, but greater absenteeism doesn't.

I didn't say that law enforcement doesn't engage in any social engineering. I'm denying the claim that every single behavior taken by a society is social engineering.

Strictly speaking, holding to the status quo and enforcing the status quo isn't social engineering as it isn't the application of sociological principles to specific social problems. Given that "telling children not to steal and to respect other people's property" is already basic in the west, it isn't an application of sociological principles, but rather simply the maintenance of a pre-existing social norm.

You can say that you don't "buy this", but honestly M_P, the term is used to refer to some sets of behaviors and not to others, and the metric of focusing on whether a behavior is engineering vs maintenance works to this end. Note: I did point out that this effort is actually a fair effort, and that it would apply to marginal tax changes, as any invocation of the Laffer curve is blatantly social engineering.

Just postulate some cultural shift (never mind how that shift would happen) that businesses are unwilling to hire unhealthy people, and there are few or no businesses that are willing to deviate from this norm. That it doesn't make perfect economic sense for businesses to do this is irrelevant- businesses have refused to hire blacks and other groups many times even when it would be in their economic interests to do so. Unlike race and some other characteristics that have defined underclasses in the past, health is, to some degree, the result of our own choices. Is it acceptable to have widespread, pervasive discrimination against people for their personal lifestyle choices, as long as that discrimination is not officially sanctioned by the state?


Representative government does have feedback mechanisms, imperfect though they may be. And the notion of competition is irrelevant if all your competitors do the same thing as you do.


But what about every business?