This is your brain on activism

CNN has an excellent example of activism-damaged thinking. The summary is that some labcoated killjoy has "discovered" that higher prices decrease demand. He shows that, unsurprisingly, decreased demand for alcohol means less drinking and less drinking means fewer people drink themselves to death (crashes not included). I suppose it is nice to see basic supply and demand demonstrated, but of course the lablord wants the interpretation to be that taxes should be raised through the roof to decrease drinking deaths. Characteristic errors of someone whose brain is warped by long years of activism:

• Ignoring diminishing returns. The tax increases were quite large: 37% in the first case and 90% in the second, but returns diminish rapidly, from -29% to -11% after the second increase. Since the second tax increase was more than twice the first one, but had less than half the effect, sin taxes look very inefficient for controlling behavior.
• Making a mountain out of a mole hill. The effect was small in absolute terms, -23 deaths/year after the first increase, then -21 after the second. The first change was, at the time, about 0.006% of the population. The second was about 0.003%. These are paltry numbers to generate national news with, let alone set policy.
  
• Treating open systems as closed. Even Alaska is easy enough to leave for another state. Someone who is drinking to the point of cirrhosis has dedicated his life to it. What fraction of that 20-40 / year had simply moved?
• Making broad policy recommendations from a narrow study. What happened to deaths due to other drugs? Alcohol is dangerous compared to pot, but it is baby formula compared to meth. Meth and several other dangerous drugs are very cheap, and if, as is likely, a large proportion of the people who die of drinking are already marginal or actually on the street, the illegality and nastiness of meth would little discourage them from shifting from more-expensive 40s to meth, as a supplement or replacement.
  
• Treating human behavior as static. By dropping car accidents and other violent deaths, the study potentially hides offsetting increases in those. For instance, when activists got Washington to increase the drinking age to 21 but Idaho had not yet changed, there was a long dangerous period when the seven miles of highway between WSU and U Idaho had a horrific rate of accidents. Of course what had happened was that WSU students had acquired the new habit of getting drunk in Idaho, and then driving back to WSU. In this case, if higher taxes shift the proportion of drinking that is done in bars, the accident rate could easily change.
• Not thinking their argument through to its logical conclusion. If preventing 23 deaths / year justifies higher taxes, why not just ration alcohol directly? If you have to present little ration coupons torn from your We-Luv-U HHS ration book whenever you want a drink, you will certainly have a hard time drinking too much. I am giving the doctoroid the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he would agree that disallowing even moderate drinking would be wrong.
• Not applying similar cost-benefit and risk analysis elsewhere. How many people die in skiing accidents in Alaska each year? Snowboarding is even more dangerous; how about taxes to encourage everyone to snowboard hardly ever, ski little, and mostly go sledding on low hills. How many people on Alaskan cruises eat their final lobster tail and expire of some cardiovascular disaster? If we only taxed people in proportion to the extra pounds they carried, we could save so very many lives. Many activisits like this Dr. Little Tin God do think such taxes should be applied, at least to ugly things like fat (I have not seen one attack dangerous sports yet), but if they were to say up front all of the things they wish to tax, ban, ration, and control, they would get no hearing. Parceling out their toxic worldview one narrow study at a time helps them hide their ambition.
• Treating their fellow men as children. Honestly, even if taxing drink by five cents a bottle would save 500 people a year, it would give me no reason to support the tax. All men die in time, but it is the exceptional privilege of Americans and a few other peoples in recent times to live in a complex and civilized society and yet also live as free men. A degree in epidemiology, as this doctor has, grants no authority to act as father to other men.
• Implicitly treating a minor good as the highest good. In this case the minor good is longevity. The activist must treat it implicitly as the highest good because a system of ethics that prizes longevity above all other goods is manifestly disgusting, and contrary to all other forms of morality, whether ancient-heroic, existentialist, Judaeo-Christian, or any other. To live only to keep living at any cost is to be enslaved by the fear of a death that is coming for you no matter how you live.
  

When did the early deaths of those who choose poorly in life become satisfactory justification for binding free men by degrees? You should not have to be a libertarian--I am not one--to be sickened by the abandonment of freedom whenever a clipboard is waved at it.