No can do

Suraiya writing in the TOI-

A can’t-do attitude is much easier to enforce than a can-do one. It is much easier to shut a school – temporarily or otherwise – than to ensure that there are basic amenities like electricity, to keep it open. It is much easier to make smoking in public places a can’t-do, than to make access to at least primary healthcare a can-do for all citizens.

The IPL exposes have, among other issues, raised the question about the legalising of gambling, which would earn the government much-needed revenue, which right now accrues to local mafias. Barring a few exceptions – such as horse racing in some centres, and ‘offshore’ casinos in Goa – the sarkar has banned gambling. Gambling is one of the many can’t-dos that the sarkar foists on us. Why? Because gambling is supposedly an un-Indian activity and injurious to our ancient culture. Which means that the Mahabharat – in which gambling plays a pivotal role – was probably authored by a prototype of Pakistan’s ISI.

I wouldn’t use the Mahabharata to strengthen any arguments. A story of skirt-chasing monarchs, irresponsible kings and queens, petty quarrels and gods embracing consequentialism in the name of the “good.” The ambivalent moral positions are what makes it interesting though.

Other than that, his argument is quite sensible. The “‘Can’t-do’ Sarkar.” A bunch of baboons running amok.

Forcing people to be ‘rational’

David Gordon of the Mises blog has reviewed a book – Peter Ubel’s “Free Market Madness: Why Human Nature Is At Odds With Economics — And Why It Matters.” Gordon writes-

Ubel, a physician trained in economics and psychology, uses behavioral economics to advocate restrictions on the free market. The market, he thinks, has its place: he quotes Adam Smith on the benefits of the division of labor and enthusiastically agrees. But market fanatics have gone too far. They defend the shocking contention that people should be free to choose as they wish, so long as they do not use or threaten force against others. Accordingly, these misguided people defend an unlimited free market: in it, the choice of consumers determines what will be produced.

Ubel agrees, at least to a large extent, that the market does exactly this. (Like most economists except Austrians, he makes an exception for public goods and externalities, but his attack on the free market in this book lies elsewhere.) But he dissents from the view that this justifies the free market. It would do so only if people chose rationally in their self-interest, and this by no means always holds true.

Science, Ubel tells us, has demonstrated people’s irrationality beyond reasonable doubt. Ubel’s tale here has three principal heroes: the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who performed pioneering experiments that show how unreasonably people decide, and the economist Richard Thaler, who developed similar ideas and brought the work of these psychologists to the attention of the economics profession. Their research explodes market fundamentalism

How does it do so? For one thing, our heroes say, people often make mistakes in reasoning. If people reason wrongly, how can they hope to get what they really want?

[...]

Regardless of its causes, though, obesity unquestionably poses health risks to many people, and Ubel wants to bring in the state to rectify matters. If you object to him that people ought to be free to decide how much to eat, or whether to smoke, for themselves, he will answer that their choices, marred by cognitive mistakes, cannot be considered the outcome of rationally self-interested deliberation. This contention, I have endeavored to show, he has failed to prove.

But he also says something else. Why, he asks, should one exalt freedom as the supreme political virtue? Must not freedom be balanced against other components of the good life? Ubel invokes Aristotle, who

viewed one of the major functions of society as being to create an environment that develops virtuous actions in its citizens. We could do worse than to follow his advice. (p. 224)

Ubel for once is right. In order to decide on correct social policy, one must posses a sound philosophy of ethics and politics, one that will consider how various goods can be achieved. Despite this bow to philosophy, though, Ubel shows no awareness that state paternalism is a controversial issue. For him, once we know that a choice has bad results, we can at once legitimately ask what the state can do to improve matters. To think otherwise makes a fetish of freedom; and he quite readily describes his proposals as paternalist.

This is a dangerous – very dangerous – position to take, and is a classic “positive liberty” position (S.E.P) – claiming that people are not “really free.” And that society or government should adopt paternalism and become a “nanny state” to guide people. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article-

[B]erlin, himself a liberal and writing during the cold war, was clearly moved by the way in which the apparently noble ideal of freedom as self-mastery or self-realization had been twisted and distorted by the totalitarian dictators of the twentieth century — most notably those of the Soviet Union — so as to claim that they, rather than the liberal West, were the true champions of freedom. The slippery slope towards this paradoxical conclusion begins, according to Berlin, with the idea of a divided self. To illustrate: the smoker in our story provides a clear example of a divided self, for she is both a self that desires to get to an appointment and a self that desires to get to the tobacconists, and these two desires are in conflict. We can now enrich this story in a plausible way by adding that one of these selves — the keeper of appointments — is superior to the other: the self that is a keeper of appointments is thus a ‘higher’ self, and the self that is a smoker is a ‘lower’ self. The higher self is the rational, reflecting self, the self that is capable of moral action and of taking responsibility for what she does. This is the true self, for rational reflection and moral responsibility are the features of humans that mark them off from other animals. The lower self, on the other hand, is the self of the passions, of unreflecting desires and irrational impulses. One is free, then, when one’s higher, rational self is in control and one is not a slave to one’s passions or to one’s merely empirical self. The next step down the slippery slope consists in pointing out that some individuals are more rational than others, and can therefore know best what is in their and others’ rational interests. This allows them to say that by forcing people less rational than themselves to do the rational thing and thus to realize their true selves, they are in fact liberating them from their merely empirical desires. Occasionally, Berlin says, the defender of positive freedom will take an additional step that consists in conceiving of the self as wider than the individual and as represented by an organic social whole — “a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn”. The true interests of the individual are to be identified with the interests of this whole, and individuals can and should be coerced into fulfilling these interests, for they would not resist coercion if they were as rational and wise as their coercers. “Once I take this view”, Berlin says, “I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man … must be identical with his freedom” (Berlin 1969, pp. 132-33). (all emphasis mine)

The idea of positive “liberty” is crazy, and so are its proponents – negative liberty is the way to go – the absence of coercion. To the Ubels of the world (his book is after all an attack on capitalism first), Ludwig von Mises had this to say-

If one rejects laissez faire [capitalism] on account of man’s fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.

One more thing – Aristotle is not the final word on ethics or politics; for example, in his Politics, he presents a (n unconvincing) defense of slavery.

‘The Decider’ and ‘The Re-distributor’

‘The Decider’ is anti-intellectual, religious, a moralist, and authoritarian. He doesn’t care about individual rights, and chops away at nearly every fundamental right the constitution of his country promises his countrymen, all the while claiming to protect them from terrorists, and their way of life – which was once based on the idea of liberty – from Islamic fascism. He claims to be a “free marketeer” (or other enemies of liberty make that claim hoping to convince people who are already convinced because they have never been taught to think for themselves) but presides over the biggest expansion of government in half a century. His moral standards do not allow him to accept that ‘obscenity’ is a form of free speech – ‘consent’ is an idea that is alien to his thought process. That’s why his escalation of the “War on Drugs” doesn’t come as a surprise; he even managed to fuck Mexico in the process. His father was no different. (You can read Abhishek’s posts on the “war” here)

—

‘The Re-distributor’ is an intellectual who gives a speech an hour long on an issue which can be answered in one sentence, if he had the conviction to do that. He is a “liberal” who is “pro-choice” but doesn’t dare to say it immediately, preferring instead to legitimize the voices of the “pro-life” lobby by claiming first that “answering that question with specificity… is above my pay grade.” For him, everything is a matter of consensus; he is, after all, a politician. He believes that the government has a big role to play in business – through more regulation; he believes that wealth needs to be “spread around.” He talks about how that may be achieved in a 2001 interview to a radio station (ignore the special effects designed to whip up passions). He specifically says this-

You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.

But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And, to that extent as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from them.

And then-

You know, maybe I’m showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way. You just look at very rare examples where during the desegregation era the court was willing to, for example, order changes that cost money to local school district[s]. And the court was very uncomfortable with it. It was very hard to manage, it was hard to figure out. You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues you know in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time. The court’s just not very good at it, and politically it’s just that its very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard. So I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally; you know I think any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts.

Read this WSJ article for more information.

His views on profits-

When I saw an article today indicating that Wall Street bankers had given themselves $20 billion worth of bonuses, the same amount of bonuses they gave themselves in 2004, at a time when most of these institutions were teetering on collapse and they are asking for taxpayers to help sustain them and when taxpayers find themselves in the difficult position that if they don’t provide help that the entire system could come down on top of our heads — that is the height of irresponsibility.

It is shameful. We’re going to be having conversations as this process moves forward directly with these folks on Wall Street to underscore that they have to start acting in a more responsible fashion if we are to together get this economy rolling again.

There will be time for them to make profits and there will be time for them to get bonuses.

Now is not that time.

Without getting into who was responsible for the crisis, and which finger the government should have shown to “businessmen” who came begging for government aid, this view on profits is a sweeping generalization that fails to consider the employer-employee contractual relationship, and the incentives that are a part of such a relationship. Were it not for his pragmatism, I would mistake him for a card-carrying member of the communist party. Then there is his sacrifice-thyself-for-society idea which includes his idea of national service-

I believe one of the tasks of the next Administration is to ensure that this movement towards service grows and sustains itself in the years to come. We should expand AmeriCorps and grow the Peace Corps. We should encourage national service by making it part of the requirement for a new college assistance program, even as we strengthen the benefits for those whose sense of duty has already led them to serve in our military.

—

‘The Decider’ and ‘The Re-distributor’ – their paths differ, but their goal is the same – the subjugation of the individual to the state. One uses (I won’t say misinterprets) God to strike at everything he doesn’t consider right; the other uses society to achieve the same end; one disregarded the constitution to “save” people from terrorists, the other thinks that the Founding Fathers didn’t play fair by placing constitutional constraints on the power of the state, making the task of redistributing wealth – economic “justice” – a bit more difficult; one fought against obscenity, the other believes in the “fairness doctrine.”

It would be a grave mistake to assume that this is just about Bush and Obama, or even about America. They are just symptoms of a greater malaise – a pandemic – collectivism, and a bankrupt thought process. For example, while writing about the choices the American public had when it came to the presidential elections, Edward Cline said this-

The rational among us are anxiously debating whom to vote for in November. From one perspective on the current race for the White House, we are faced with a choice of which devil to cut cards with (to paraphrase Wellington at Waterloo).

Do we vote for John McCain, who may or may not be better than George W. Bush in foreign policy and in adopting a semi-rational attitude toward America’s dedicated enemies, but who is “pro-American” in the same sense that Mussolini was “pro-Italian” and Hitler was “pro-German,” that is, in an un-American, nationalistic, service-to-your-country-in-a-higher-cause-than-yourself way, which implies the partial or wholesale regimentation of the American population to combat the bogeyman of the moment?

Do we vote for Barack Obama, whose anti-American, anti-military, anti-freedom, serve-your-country-until-you’re-flat-broke-and-living-in-penury-for-a-cause-higher-than-yourself solution to all problems, foreign and domestic, might mellow once he is in office and is handed on morning one the intelligence reports from the various security agencies on what our enemies (including Russia and China, not just the Islamists) are up to vis-à-vis tightening the noose around America’s neck? Or would he just grimace and think: We brought it upon ourselves.

[...]

When one studies side-by-side photos of McCain and Putin, one sees a similar, power-hungry glint in their eyes. One may legitimately suspect that the “reform” McCain promises is not so much of government, but of the American people. No, he does not believe in compulsory national service, but one may be sure of penalties if one does not “volunteer” for it. His vision of Americans united in a single cause differs in no fundamental from Obama’s, except in the path on which each wishes to lead them, “reformed” or “changed”: socialism with fascist overtones, or socialism for the sake of gutting the country of the remnants of its individualism and liberty.

In “The Nature of Government”, Ayn Rand wrote about the “legitimate” role of government, and what the constitution actually is-

In mankind’s history, the understanding of the government’s proper function is a very recent achievement: it is only two hundred years old and it dates from the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. Not only did they identify the nature and the needs of a free society, but they devised the means to translate it into practice. A free society—like any other human product—cannot be achieved by random means, by mere wishing or by the leaders’ “good intentions.” A complex legal system, based on objectively valid principles, is required to make a society free and to keep it free-a system that does not depend on the motives, the moral character or the intentions of any given official, a system that leaves no opportunity, no legal loophole for the development of tyranny.

The American system of checks and balances was just such an achievement. And although certain contradictions in the Constitution did leave a loophole for the growth of statism, the incomparable achievement was the concept of a constitution as a means of limiting and restricting the power of the government.

Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.

Now consider the extent of the moral and political inversion in today’s prevalent view of government. Instead of being a protector of man’s rights, the government is becoming their most dangerous violator; instead of guarding freedom, the government is establishing slavery; instead of protecting men from the initiators of physical force, the government is initiating physical force and coercion in any manner and issue it pleases; instead of serving as the instrument of objectivity in human relationships, the government is creating a deadly, subterranean reign of uncertainty and fear, by means of nonobjective laws whose interpretation is left to the arbitrary decisions of random bureaucrats; instead of protecting men from injury by whim, the government is arrogating to itself the power of unlimited whim—so that we are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

Did Bush have the brains, or does Obama the inclination, to understand this?

Actually Obama does understand; only, he disagrees. Rand’s government is based on the idea of true liberty – “negative liberty” – freedom from wanton interference. Obama’s “liberty”, as of every predecessor of his going back 150 years, is a “positive” one – the government will tell you how to lead your life so that you can fulfill your “potential.” A constitution based on negative liberty leads to a limited government that treats its citizens like adults; one based on positive liberty will lead to a nanny state that treats its citizens like kids; a state that prescribes rules of behavior, a state that tells them what to wear, eat, watch, listen, read, say, do; a state that lays first claim on their income through a “voluntary” income tax of the progressive kind – the one who earns more, pays more.

—

‘The Decider’ and ‘The Re-distributor’ may be political opponents, but they are ideological partners-in-crime. The crime is the murder of freedom in broad daylight as the world watches, and applauds.

Megalomaniac

India’s billion plus population means everything we do or encounter will automatically find its way into the record books. And that’s what has happened with the nonsensical Ramadossian anti-smoking crusade – its now the world’s biggest public smoking ban. Comments on this Churumuri poll show what most people feel about it. There are a few voices of sanity (including my extremely cynical one), but they are, well, few.

The Pioneer editor Chandan Mitra, the one who demanded that Swaminathan Aiyar, Vir Sanghvi and others who wrote about the secession of Kashmir be tried for treason, writes against the smoking ban-

Besides jihadi terror, another kind of terror has just been let loose on urban India. Both the police and vigilante squads are on the prowl to satiate the megalomania of the Union Health Minister. I can’t smoke in my office premises, not even on the terrace or balcony leave alone a secluded private chamber. I can’t go to a bar to enjoy a couple of drinks with friends, nor can I light up in a restaurant while I wait for food to be served or after a satisfying meal. It is still not clear whether hotels will be allowed to earmark some smoking rooms, but I am certain that Adolf Hitler’s worthy Indian follower will think of some devious plan to prosecute hotels if they do.

I am not comparing Ramadoss to Hitler in jest. Unlike his peers in an age where smoking was the norm rather than the exception (Allied leaders Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and Josef Stalin were all smokers), the German dictator pathologically despised the habit. Although he did not go quite so far as Ramadoss, the Nazis banned smoking at party meetings and told members to aggressively “persuade” smokers to abandon the addiction. A massive publicity blitz was launched by the Nazi Government to make people aware of the evils of smoking. How miserably Hitler failed in his mission is apparent from the fact that Germany still has rather liberal anti-smoking laws. Earlier this year, the State of Bavaria scrapped the regulation prohibiting smoking in bars and public places, citing both economic and practical reasons.

Ramadoss is a megalomaniac – no question about it; he is the nanny paternalists have always dreamed about. And after letting the law loose on smokers, he now wants to place a ban on tobacco products, but after providing “alternative employment” to the thousands of tobacco farmers. So till this unachievable goal is met, the sin taxes will keep on piling and farmers can grow the crop that “kills”. Nothing contradictory about the whole thing, right? If a ban is indeed imposed, however, the trade will go underground, prices will rise, the quality will go down, and people will be harassed just like marijuana and opium users are (BJP leader Jaswant Singh had to face the heat after being charged under the dangerous Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act).

As it is, with the present smoking ban, some cops might find it more lucrative to slap challans (or not slap them rather) on smokers instead of tackling other crimes. To their credit, some police departments have complained about having better things to do than babysitting smokers – we don’t want a repeat of the Maharashtra fiasco where RR Patil sent his cops out to grab bar girls, and a few days later bombs went off in local trains around Mumbai. Stretching things too far I accept, but shouldn’t the police concentrate on tackling violent crimes instead of harassing couples fondling each other, or swindling college kids with “pictures” on their mobile phones?

There could have been a very simple answer to the whole mess – privatize all public property. So owners will set the rules on what is and what is not permissible on their premises. Business men who smoke can even decide against hiring non-smoking crusaders – equal opportunity employer status be damned! The only problem? The Indian Government does not respect private property – how else would you explain restaurants, pubs, bars, private offices etc being termed as “public space” or “public” whatever? And Sauvik Chakraverti puts his finger on this very problem.

Update: Fixed minor errors.

Up In Smoke

On Saturday, BBC World ran a program, Bannatyne Takes On Big Tobacco: This World (its been telecast in the UK couple of weeks back), which raised serious questions on marketing strategies followed by British American Tobacco (BAT) in developing countries like Mauritius, Malawi and Nigeria – particularly the targeting of minors. You can read about its contents in brief here. And BAT’s response here. One small item which finds no mention in either of the reports is the story of a boy (he is 10-12 years old) who makes his living selling cigarettes. He also smokes about 4 sticks a day, but since he is illiterate, he cannot read the “injurious to health” warnings that governments force tobacco companies to carry on cigarette packets. He is puffing away without being aware of the risks involved.

Most people are aware of the risks of smoking cigarettes – it can kill (my grandfather, a case in point, died of throat cancer); and the risks involved in “passive smoking”; and the addictive nature of nicotine which makes it very difficult for adults to quit the habit, leave alone children. That is why people in developed countries are giving up on the habit. And so tobacco companies are trying to encash on “uninformed” demand from developing countries before common sense catches up there. However, it would be unfair to give the entire credit of falling cigarette sales to consumers, since restrictive laws have played their own part.

Marie Brenner’s 1996 Vanity Fair article, The Man Who Knew Too Much (the basis for Michael Mann’s 1999 film The Insider), provides an in depth account of the workings of Big Tobacco. Consider this statement attributed to Jeffrey Wigand, the whistle blower who had worked with Brown & Williamson, subsidiary of BAT – “you have to look at the age somebody starts smoking. If you don’t get them before they are 18 or 20, you never get them,” – and it becomes clear why youngsters are a big market.

A lot of people might be angry at such practices – how dare they target poor kids in Africa! We need tougher laws! Etc etc. But this reaction is an emotional one – and has no sound basis. There is another danger to such blind reactions – a slow and steady movement towards an authoritarian state. Before I move on to the whats and the whys, consider this quote that was on a button Wigand once wore – IF YOU THINK EDUCATION IS EXPENSIVE, TRY IGNORANCE.

Informed choice
Informed choice does not mean that the seller has to provide you with the information. It means you should know what you are getting into. Governments exist to protect people from other people, and not to protect them from themselves. Whether I am in the market for a prostitute, a pancake, a packet of cigarettes, or for potassium cyanide, it is my choice, and therefore my headache what I intend to do with them. Each one has its own risks, and the government has no business interfering in the transaction. Unfortunately, while the editor of the Guinness Book of World Records understands the balance between choice and risk when he says – “if you put your life at risk, then fine; if you put someone else’s life at risk, not fine,” governments, don’t.

Choice – informed choice – is the strongest argument that can be used to counter any government action that subverts a free market. And banning tobacco product advertising, regulating growth and sale of tobacco in its various forms, and forcing establishments to follow laws prohibiting smoking are subversive actions. If a television channel or newspaper or comic book decides to run tobacco adverts, it is their choice. Responsible parents who have children of impressionable age will immediately stop subscribing to them – the market at work. A tobacco farmer grows tobacco because there is a demand for his produce. The moment demand plummets, he will move over to some other alternative – the market at work. If a restaurant or bar wants to have a smoking area, or they want to become 100% smoking establishments, it is their prerogative. Customers patronizing them can make a choice, If they choose to enter an environment that they know is smoke-filled, it is their choice. The market works, again.

Government intervention
The kid who sells cigarettes and smokes them too, without knowing the risks is an unfortunate case. But that does not in any way give governments the authority to play around with the market. Laws cannot be based on whims, and they cannot be based on emotions. If these were sufficient reason enough to justify action, why have laws in the first place – the Salem witch hunt trials and similar kangaroo courts worked just as fine.

While a lot of big businesses, particularly those which we pejoratively address using the adjective Big do play hardball, governments are not any less guilty. They are infact the deadliest trustees of unimaginable power ever invented by man. Governments (and parliament) have the power to make laws and hence when you deal with them, you are always playing against an opponent who uses loaded dice. And the US government is one of the worst when it comes to such tactics. Consider the decade old US Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, which on the face of it probably is the biggest extortion in world history, and government was party to it.

The US government spends hundreds of billions of dollars on subsidizing health care costs. Many people who took advantage of the subsidy fell prey to tobacco related diseases. So various US state governments banded together and sued the tobacco companies who then signed an agreement to pay out 206 billion US dollars as penalties over a period of time. But things are not that simple. A few state governments changed their laws so that tobacco companies could no longer defend themselves in court. Lawyers who engineered the deal pocketed fees in tens of billions of dollars for work that is suspect. The payment over a period of time is being recovered by raising cigarette prices – basically a tax. What did the tobacco companies get in return? A virtual monopoly. Read Walter Olson’s January 2000 Reason Magazine article Puff, the Magic Settlement for more information.

How does this help the consumer in anyway? It does not. The addict will always be smoking, paying high prices all the time. Some will quit, some will die, the others will go on. The tobacco companies now have a government sanctioned monopoly. And governments have plenty of money to fund their brain dead schemes; the sale of tobacco is controlled so that vocal sections of the population are mollified, but it is not banned altogether because it is a huge revenue source. Government intervention helps? Whom?

Rise of the Nanny State
This BBC report presents a worldwide picture of government attitude towards the “smoking menace”. And it is not a good sign. The “nanny virus” is spreading. In New York, restaurants are now compelled to post calorie counts on menus. So consumers can now know how many calories they are taking in. But here’s the thing – if I really want to know about it, I will do my own research, won’t I? If people feel governments are justified in looking into matters concerning their citizens personal health, surely they won’t mind if governments introduce mandatory morning yoga classes. All citizens who don’t make an appearance should be fined heavily. After all governments are doing it for their own good. The “calorie count” law is not the only thing. Governments are also into “ban the trans fat” game. And things are only going to get worse.

You may not like smoking cigarettes, or drinking alcohol, or any of those things. But if you consider your dislike for them or the harmful nature of those products reasons enough to ask for their regulation or ban, you dismantle yet another barrier that protects you from the Government. And once Government enters a territory, it does not cede control. If you have read the Mahabharata or seen its TV adaptation, you know that Bhishma fought against his favorite grandsons because he had pledged his allegiance to the throne of Hastinapur. Now you probably understand why he did what he did – it was a matter of principle.