Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

The Fresca Rebellion

It's the left that's turning conservative. Well, not conservative, but pushy. Weisberg put his finger on the underlying trend: "Because Democrats hold power at the moment, they face the greater peril of paternalistic overreaching." Today's morality cops are less interested in your bedroom than your refrigerator. They're more likely to berate you for outdoor smoking than for outdoor necking. It isn't God who hates fags. It's Michael Bloomberg.

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The Tax War on Soda

The food police are closing in on their next target: a soda tax.

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, they propose a penny-per-ounce excise tax on "sugared beverages." That's nearly $3 per case. Why so much? Because this tax, unlike the petty junk-food taxes of yesteryear, is designed to hurt. Its purpose is to discourage you from buying soda, on the grounds that soda, like smoking, is bad for you.

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No Tears for Salt

First they came for the cigarettes. Then the soda. Then trans fats. Then fast food. Now salt.

Reuters brings the news from across the Atlantic:

Alarmed by high death rates from strokes in Portugal, deputies from the ruling Socialist party submitted a bill to parliament Friday to slash the use of salt in bread ... The bill calls for salt content to be cut to a maximum of 14 grammes per kg, or by about 25 percent, introducing fines of up to 5,000 euros ($6,435) for exceeding this. ... Socialists have the majority of seats in parliament and the bill is likely to pass without a hitch.

Yes, the socialists. Cue Rush Limbaugh.

The rationales are the same ones we've already used to legislate against trans fats and fast food. Saving lives:

According to the Portuguese Society of High Blood Pressure, a reduction of salt intake by one gramme a day on average would save 2,650 lives per year.

And saving money:

The document links excessive salt consumption to high blood pressure, which in turn causes strokes, generally reduces life expectancy and means high medication costs for the state.

We don't have a viable Socialist Party in the United States. But could salt restrictions happen here? Sure. Little more than a year go, the FDA held a hearing to consider regulating salt as a food additive. Proponents argued that we eat too much salt, that reductions could save 150,000 lives a year, and that we could lower health-care expenses.

Then, a few months ago, New York City health commissioner Thomas Frieden, with the asserted support of health departments in other cities, summoned food-company executives to the mayor's residence and urged them, in concert, to cut the salt content of high-sodium foods by 25 percent in five years, and then to cut the same percentage again in the next five years, for a total reduction of nearly 50 percent. He told the New York Times, "If there's not progress in a few years, we'll have to consider other options, like legislation."

Can Frieden and his allies deliver on the legislative threat if the food industry doesn't cooperate? I don't know. In some ways, the more interesting question is what happens if the industry does cooperate. The plan is essentially collusion between the government and an all-encompassing alliance of corporations. The aim is to deprive consumers of the targeted food item, beyond a specified limit, through "quiet, mass reduction." Frieden's team calls it "stealth health":

He wants to get most of the major food and restaurant companies to do the same thing at the same time ... Key to the plan is a gradual reduction in sodium levels. The theory is that if the salt disappears slowly enough, consumers will not notice. Dr. Sonia Angell, director of cardiovascular health for the city, said: "We've created a whole society of people accustomed to food that is really, really salty. We have to undo that."

I'm supposed to be a raving libertarian. But I like the collusion plan. My six-year-old daughter is a total salt fiend (she's been that way since birth, unlike my son), and even she couldn't finish the can of Progresso vegetable soup she requested for lunch yesterday. Why? Because it has 990 milligrams of sodium—41 percent of the recommended daily allowance. So I poured out the "broth" and substituted hot water, and she gave it the thumbs-up. That's how salty the soup was: The vegetables alone made water taste like broth.

Corn chips are the same way. The number of grocery stores near us that offer unsalted chips has dwindled to one. But that's what I keep in the house, so our kids are used to it. A month ago, we were served Fritos on an airline flight, and we could barely stand them. That's what happens when you dial down the salt volume in your life: You start to notice how absurdly oversalted most prepared foods are.

Dr. Angell is right: Today's unhealthy salt levels have been commercially manufactured. It's now much harder to escape salt than to find it. And nobody's talking about taking away your table salt. If you want to dump 990 milligrams into your soup, it's your funeral.

So here's to you, Dr. Frieden. I hope you and your captains of industry get away with your hush-hush salt-fixing scheme. I want to see whether people really miss all that sodium, or whether they get used to a saner level and don't miss a thing. And I want to see whether we can pull this off without legislation. I'll keep quiet about it if you will.

The Temptation of Chastity Belts

Wow. Chastity belts.

Here's the report from Indonesia, courtesy of Paul Watson in Sunday's L.A. Times:

In a bid to prevent any hanky-panky between masseuses and their clients, several massage parlors ... are insisting that the women wear padlocks across the zippers of their work pants. ... [The instigating parlor owner] settled on black pants that zip up at the side, where a padlock is slipped through two cloth loops and snapped shut each time a masseuse meets a client. ... He stores the padlocks and keys in a special box at the cashier's counter. When a customer arrives for a massage, given in a private room behind a curtain, the "cashier calls one masseuse, asks her to prepare things and locks her pants," ... [and] "when the client is done, the masseuse comes to the cashier, and the cashier opens the padlock."
Several other parlor owners have supposedly decided to adopt similar locks. A local official says, "We expect this policy to be enacted as city legislation."

Any time somebody tries to take society back a few centuries, I like to know why. The instigating owner, Franky Setiawan, says he resorted to the belts because men "bombarded" his masseuses with sexual demands, and he wanted the women to feel safe. He says he and other owners have been looking for ways "to handle some naughty guests."

Ah. The old feminine-protection rationale.

The idea isn't crazy. To say that men often behave like pigs is to insult pigs. Boorishness, harassment, and sexual coercion are real problems. But let's think this through.

To begin with, there's the small problem of excretion. What the man thinks of as his—or some other guy's—way into the woman happens to be, rather more importantly, her way out. That's why, as Setiawan mentions, the masseuse "usually pees" before the cashier locks her pants. So, we're starting with a glaring engineering mistake: inconveniencing the victim more than the perpetrator.

Next, there's the political context. "In recent years, conservative Islamic values have gained influence" in Indonesia, Watson reports. "Last month, Indonesia's parliament passed a bill that makes it a crime to look at violent or pornographic material on the Internet. The penalty is up to three years in prison." So when Setiawan talks about how the chastity outfits will improve his industry's public image, you can see how workplace protection serves as a fig leaf for his awkward mix of puritanism and financial self-interest.

Finally, there's the telltale language of sexual paternalism. The problem with the some of the industry's male clients, according to Setiawan, is that "they try over and over and over again, persuading our workers with their dangerously sweet words."

Persuasion? Sweet words? This is the crisis? Words are intolerably coercive, but chastity belts aren't?

You can see how easy it is, as a paternalist, to talk yourself into absurdity. Once you get it into your head that motive is more important than method, you and your excellent motives are on the way to dystopia.

Before you deride the Indonesians, look at what's happening in the United States. Legislatures are passing laws right and left to mandate provision of ultrasound images to women seeking abortions. I support the idea of viewing an ultrasound before you make the decision. But when legislators add doctor scripts, patient viewing mandates, waiting periods, and other heavy-handed paternalist garbage, count me out.

Now comes a ballot initiative in Missouri that would hold doctors liable for "medical negligence" unless, prior to any abortion, they administer a formal psychological evaluation to ascertain whether the woman has been pressured into it. The measure's sponsors propose that women be asked: "Is someone else encouraging you to have this abortion? Do you want this abortion to satisfy your own needs or are you looking to do this to please someone else?" These questions are necessary because, as all paternalists know, women don't really want what they came to the clinic for. "The sad reality is that many abortion providers simply do abortions on request, no questions asked," the measure's sponsors lament. By failing to second-guess their patients, these providers fail "to help women in the ways they want and deserve."

I'm not saying coerced abortions never happen. There's clear evidence that they sometimes do. But you can see from the Missouri initiative how easily the notion of feminine vulnerability leads to interference dressed up as protection. And this is the crucial lesson of chastity belts, abortion regulation, and most other paternalist measures: The pressure from which you set out to protect women, bad as it may be, is seldom as ugly or coercive as the pressure your intervention imposes.