Minimum pricing is wrong

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-22250584

As usual, I've been inspired by a news story. This one is a little argument over minimum pricing of alcohol. The Scottish government has apparently had inaccurate and biased submissions from the drinks industry, which opposes minimum pricing. This is hardly shocking. What is shocking is that governments continue to trust industry sources' information and opinions when looking into regulation of that industry.

That's not my subject for today. I want to express my revulsion for the concepts behind minimum pricing.
The argument is, as implied in the BBC news article, that low alcohol prices encourage drinking at home. People get hammered on their own, without the social pressure or regulation that they'd experience in a pub. Low alcohol prices supposedly also mean that people buy more alcohol (they have a set alcohol budget and buy as much as they can within that budget).
The correlation of negative effects with low alcohol prices are apparently indisputable, as is the direction of causation.

'Dr McCambridge said: "Our study showed that the alcohol industry, including both the producers and the big supermarkets, consistently oppose affective approaches to alcohol polices by misrepresenting strong evidence of what works. There is an international consensus in the research community that the approach of the Scottish government is the correct one." '

I suspect it's actually a spelling error, but the use of the word 'affective' is central to my point today. A minimum price may be effective (it has an effect), but it is also an emotional (affective) response that is incompletely thought-through.

I can't comment on the strength of the evidence over whether the harms of alcohol really are greater when it's cheaper. I do know that many alcoholics are relatively wealthy people who will continue to buy alcohol even if the minimum price is a bit higher, regulated by government. I suppose that minimum pricing is intended to hit the binge drinkers who stock up before a big night out.

However, these are not the only people who buy cheap alcohol. I know that binge-drinking is more prevalent amongst young people, but young people are also the ones who are poor and often buy cheap alcohol for moderate drinking; something to go with a meal with friends, or to have one drink whilst watching television in the evenings.
Minimum pricing will reduce these people's quality of life, not increase it. Meals with friends will cost more. Perfectly reasonable consumption will no longer be possible for their low level of income. Why should they be punished for the actions of others?

If we have a playpark that some children are drawing graffiti on, do we start charging an entrance fee? That will help keep away the poor children and the children with mean parents. No doubt children who wish to draw graffiti are mostly poorly supervised and are frequently from poorer backgrounds, and will not pay the entrance fee. So we will have protected the playpark, but at what cost? We will have rendered it a luxury for the rich and excluded legitimate use by poor or neglected children.

If a child in a class misbehaves and the teacher does not see who did it, he can hold the entire class behind. This neatly ensures that he does indeed punish the offender for the misbehaviour. But he also punishes the rest of the class for something that they did not do. This sort of injustice is called collective punishment and at an adult level is regarded as so offensive that it is banned by the Geneva Convention on Human Rights.
It is a fundamental part of law (both English and Continental, I think) that if the perpetrator of a crime cannot be identified or punished then the innocent shall not be punished as collateral damage. This I know because I recently listened to a very interesting discussion on the radio about prosecuting twins, and how they are often acquitted because of the inability to prove which of them comitted a crime.

So why, given this, do we think it perfectly acceptable to punish harmless purchasing of alcohol solely in order to make some alcohol abuse more expensive?

We should punish the offenders. When there is disorder in town centres, arrest and fine the offenders. When there is loud noise in residential areas, fine the offenders. Where a poor person is harmlessly drinking at home, fine the ... oh wait, why should this person pay more? An increase in price is collective punishment of those whose means do not stretch to casually consuming expensive products.
It's saying 'those poor people make all the trouble, so let's make them all pay for it'. It's based on grossly offensive tribal/class thinking, or possibly a simple lack of thought. Either way, it is unacceptable for researchers to recommend it, or for governments to implement it.

I do not care if utility is maximised by punishing the innocent. I do not care if the most solid economic research ever conducted shows that liver disease will be entirely eradicated by punishing the innocent. Economics and social science can show wonderful consequences for their interests (i.e the effect only on anti-social behaviour and alcoholic disease), but the consequences for others must be considered too, and must be given priority. An economist might say that this is an externality of the programme that must be internalised, but it's a specific type of externality. It does not affect just anyone else in society. This externality affects only poor drinkers. These sorts of discriminatory rules should be avoided, as it's impossible to recompense poor drinkers specifically.

This is not limited to minimum alcohol pricing. It's also relevant to the fat tax, which is even more pernicious because fat is healthy and necessary, and it's actually refined sugar that is more unhealthy. No matter which we tax, though, it's over-consumption that is the problem, not any form of consumption. Taxes punish those who do enough exercise to burn off their calories, or those who need the calories to power their exercise. By making exercising more expensive, a fat tax designed to promote health might reduce it, ensuring that the poor can only afford to be in mediocre health, not fit and active as is best.

Apart from a distinct inability to think of the wider consequences and escape the blinkers of thinking that a solution for a problem has no other effects, one cause of these ridiculous proposals is that the NHS must care for all people, but people's choices affect how much care they need. We have a destruction of accountability: we are not holding people accountable for their own health.
We need a safety net. Not all health issues are caused by the individual who suffers them, and a major function of society is to protect people from the mishaps and chance brutality of nature.

But some health problems are caused by the individual, and collective responsibility for such issues is wrong. By making the state pay for these problems, we encourage it to interfere with personal freedom in a bid to reduce its costs.
What we need is for these issues to cost a person money. We could charge people extra money for treatments of alcoholic liver disease and obesity-related heart disease. But we have made it a vital part of the NHS that it is free at the point of delivery (except dentistry, eye care, adult social care, sufficient physiotherapy and prescriptions).
There remains an alternative. We need an insurance system in which people pay for the risks they incur. Heavy drinkers would pay more as they drink, but not for the alcohol which can be consumed in moderation. They would pay for the 'heavy' part of heavy drinking. Obese people would pay for their over-consumption, rather than everyone paying for any form of consumption.
The only place where a tax works is smoking, because there is no safe limit. Smoking is always harmful, and so a tax is appropriate.

But where there are threshold effects, a blanket tax is unfair and disporportionately harms the poor. A minimum price only harms the poor. Neither is acceptable.

Monstrous education

Why are people so obsessed with the average scores?
If having rich and/or intelligent people in classes with poor/stupid people makes the average level higher beyond the addition of a high-end datum to the mix, it's not necessarily a good thing.
Yes, we want low-achievers to achieve more. But why should we sacrifice the achievement of high-achievers to that end?

If high achievers take less teacher time, and hence allow more time to be dedicated to low achievers in order to get everyone over a threshold, we're sacrificing the high-achiever's achievement beyond that threshold.

What is it that makes a high-achiever deserving of discrimination? Why should such a person get less teaching time than a low achiever?

If we want a society of utter equality, and are willing to enforce it, why don't we shave everyone's head to stop bald people standing out? Why not pluck out everyone's eyes to stop blind people being disadvantaged?

The idea that good pupils should be forced into classes in order to benefit other pupils is monstrous. We should show that this will not hurt their education in any way, and consider other giant reorganisations of the educational system that will cost a lot to introduce, before we jump on the idea.

I am, by the way, very sceptical of the idea that good pupils act as role-models for bad ones. In my limited experience of dealing with children it seems more like a couple of bad apples can sour the whole barrel, rather than a few good ones making everything better.

Private schools do promote inequality. That is a bad thing. But selection is not a bad thing, and if state schools streamed pupils, as happens in Holland, and used to happen here, then I'd happily shut down private schools.

The argument against private schools has to be a separate one from the horrific ideals/ unproven assertions of the arguments against selection.

Equality

The following post is an amalgamation of some responses I made to an interlocutor who was promoting the doctrine of equality.

The idea that we can dismiss all characteristics as irrelevant to a person's worth is a circular argument. We start of with the supposition that everyone is of equal worth, and then use this premise to discard any factor that might make people of different worth, and then finally conclude that everyone is of equal worth.

The statement that everyone is of equal worth is false. There is obviously no practical justification for such a statement, so we turn to moral justification. I can't think of any moral premise that can lead us to the conclusion that 'everyone is of equal worth' except by arbitrarily assuming this to be so.

This assumption leads to some interesting conclusions. If everyone deserves the same amount of life satisfaction, then people like myself who are not particularly excitable or happy deserve far more resources than those who provide these things for themselves; or, in contrast, people like myself who are never depressed deserve less simply because of who we are.

Similarly, a hunter who catches three rabbits for every one rabbit another catches is in effect being told that his rabbits are of less value if both get the same outcomes. That's hardly fair treatment.

Finally, ability is not simply inherent to some people, but is multiplicative with effort. If I make the effort to achieve more, giving me the same reward is telling me that effort is worthless. If everyone deserves the same outcomes as everyone else, we are telling people that character and virtue are worthless. This is in stark contrast to many moral theories, whose main aim is to justify the labelling of virtues as virtues.

I know that invoking Karl Marx will make some people automatically disagree, but he agreed with me:

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only -- for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.

Marx is saying that we can have equal rights or equality, but not both. If try to change the natural differences in ability, desire and need then we will treat people very unequally, which would contravene a doctrine of equal rights and equal worth in the eyes of the law. I won't touch further on the idea of taking into account people's subjective wants and desires in order to try to give everyone the same amount of life satisfaction. There are enough problems with that for a post on its own.

People are not practically equal. This is an undeniable fact (as long as you accept anything about reality at all). If we grant them equal moral worth then we make sure that we don't have universal rules that specifically grant more rights or punishment to a pre-defined group of people. That is the essence of giving everyone equal worth: that all are equal in the eyes of the law (to start with).
If we start dealing in resources, rather than simply moral rights such as which actions a person can and cannot take, we move into defining material worth. If we are defining material worth, we cannot escape the fact that people are not materially(/practically) equal.
I refuse to accept that equal moral worth necessitates a jump to enforcing equal material worth. Moral worth is about not denying a person a place on a bus simply because of skin colour. Material worth is unconnected. If a person cannot pay for the bus ride, then skin or not he doesn't get a ride.
If someone is so materially lacking that he is unable to fulfill basic moral rights, such as voting, getting public services that are theoretically available to all and so on, then these things are not available to all, despite the moral contention that they should be, and so our society has passed laws to ensure that they are more accessible. This requires material investment, but it is not a statement of material worth.

A lot of unhappiness and dissatisfaction comes from the equation in people's minds of material and moral worth and the observable differences in material worth. The solution is not to attempt to make everyone of equal material worth despite the manifest injustices that would be involved, nor simply to state that it's a theoretical goal that can never be achieved (what a system of morality that would be, that states that the world is immoral, even before any free agent has taken his first action!).
The solution is to accept that it is fallacious to link material and moral worth. If we can expunge this foolish notion from people's heads a great many aspects of life would be avoided. Things like the hero worship of rich men, the hesitance to challenge and stand up to the old and established, the deference to irrationality because it's spoken by a successful businessman... all these things are partly caused by foolish people linking moral worth to other factors. A simple excision of the fallacy of 'the appeal to authority' from the world would be a nice start, including removing the use of (and need for) endless references to old philosophers (like Karl Marx).

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who then was the gentleman?

is the refrain of the Peasants' Revolt (of 1381). These people were not arguing about whether they ought to receive as much life satisfaction as everyone else. They were simply stating that 'Jack's as good as his master', not in terms of material worth, but in rights. They wanted to be able to travel to different farms and get paid what they could get (because labour was in short supply after the plague), rather than be constrained by area or by fixed prices. This line of radical politics has long been an English tradition, but I don't see it as leading necessarily to equal material worth.
In contrast, I can see an English tradition for pricking pomposity and arrogance. The English as a nation have for a long time had a tradition of marked irreverence for status and authority. It is this radical notion that moral (and intellectualand logical) worth is not linked to social status, power or wealth that has been particularly well-incubated in England, and it is this fact that continues to escape philosophers, politicians, the rich, wealthy and powerful all over the world.

Radicalism need not delve into strange notions of absolute equality. Simple confirmation of what peasants knew 600 years ago would be a good start for modern politics.