A Stitch in Haste

Ezra Klein does what he does best: be wrong —

As [Jacob] Sullum says, “If customers really were clamoring for conspicuous calorie counts, restaurants would provide them voluntarily.” That sentence competes for space with a poll showing 84 percent of Californians support caloric labeling requirements, and the basic reality the article is responding to: Democratically elected legislators who depend on the favor of voters for their jobs are the ones trying to pass a bill. Because they think it popular. The idea that public preferences only have legitimacy if they’re strong enough to be heard atop the clamor of the market is an exceedingly odd one.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

In order to filter out the background noise that inevitably follows topics even slightly connected to health care economics, the war on obesity, questions of latent racism in inner-city-only regulation, etc., let me invent a parable that I think retains its robustness when extended to compulsory (rather than market-driven) calorie labeling.

I do not like to ski. There’s no particular reason I can point to explaining why I do not like to ski. I’m physically capable of skiing. I can afford to ski. There are no regulations or rituals concerning skiing that offend me. I just don’t like it.

Given that my participation (i.e., as a consumer-demander) in the ski market is exactly zero, my views on anything related to the ski market will never be registered in that market, and neither should they be. If I don’t ski now, and nothing the ski industry does could change that, then my preferences are and ought be irrelevant. Adam Smith’s “hand” is not only invisible but also incorporeal. It passes right through me, neither affecting me nor affected by me.

Now assume that Klein’s favor-dependent, “democratically elected” activist legislators (who, as those of us in the true “reality-based community” know, are actually responding to rent-seekers or other factions, or perhaps driven simply by their own hubris), decide that the ski industry is not family-friendly enough. They propose a law requiring all ski resorts to offer unlimited free hot chocolate to any customers under 18. (You can imagine the various disingenuous talking points these pro-cocoa politicians would concoct, and it is not my purpose to list them.)

Recall that I am not a participant in the ski market. And, given my demographic, a “free hot chocolate for kids” law is not going to change that. The invisible hand and I are still strangers. Nevertheless, I might think that the proposed free cocoa law is a good idea. Maybe I support the activist legislator; maybe if his activist legislation were put to a referendum I would vote for it.

So what? Why should my view on a ski industry law matter one way or the other when I am not a participant in the ski market?

Now suppose that “84 percent” (remember that number?) of people are pro-cocoa. Again, so what? If they don’t ski, then how is the lack of free hot chocolate in the absence of government coercion a “market failure”? A market that ignores the people who ignore it has not “failed.”

If, on the other hand, 84 percent of skiers (or, more precisely, skiers and potential skiers) were found to want free hot chocolate for minors, do you think the industry would oblige?

So, going back to fast food and calorie labeling: Klein’s argument — which amounts to “the people want it but the market does not provide it, therefore the market has failed and government intervention is justified” — is simply not correct. “Voters” are not the same sample set as “customers” — and that matters, or ought to matter, in a free society.

(And that’s not even incorporating the question of varying expenditures: All voters are, hopefully, equal at the ballot box — but different people cast different numbers of “dollar votes” in a burger shop. So “X percent of voters” is meaningless compared to “X percent of dollars spent or potentially spent.”).

It would be arrogant enough for a skier to “demand” (i.e., by government fiat) free hot chocolate for minors from a ski lodge. For a non-skier to demand it in his capacity “as a voter” is an order of magnitude worse.

It’s quite simple really: You are entitled to your opinion. You are not always entitled to vote on it.

—

Further down in the piece, Klein actually refutes his own thesis:

Subway is already touted as the healthful option. They post their calorie numbers voluntarily because they want to emphasize the over healthfulness of the menu. It’s advertising as much as information, and the Subway menu is formulated to make it good advertising. That’s why they posted the information of their own volition.

So when the invisible hand works without government intervention, that’s somehow proof that the invisible hand doesn’t work and that the government must intervene? Can Klein honestly not see that he is completely contradicting his own thesis? Or does he just not care?

Maybe his columns should come with some mandatory labeling too.

(Sullum responds to Klein here.)

Previously:
–Kip’s Law Sighting: On Disguising Nanny Statism as “Mere Zoning”
–From the Archives: When Will “Trans Farce” Be Banned?
–CSPI Sues to Censor Junk Food Ads
–No Fries — Cheeps!
–The Wrong Burger, at the Wrong Place, at the Wrong Time