That seems a pretty flawed statement. It can be easier to ban manufacture of the goods that would go into the Banned Store than to ban resale of individual items. A bottle of sulfuric acid is nigh-untraceable, but the lab or factory making the acid isn’t. If you’re a teen who wants booze or cigs, you just have to find a friendly adult who’ll bring them out of 7-11 to you; if you want pot or crack, you have to find a way to plug into the illegal drug networks. Obviously not impossible, or even super-hard perhaps, but certainly harder.

Regarding the latest evidence suggesting food additives harm childrens health, Tom Watson says this:
Until junior Watson was able to tell that not all food on the end of a small blue plastic spoon was the same, I’d not fully appreciated just h…

Paternalists aren’t going to like this idea: “let anything the government would have banned be sold only at special ‘would have banned’ stores, whose customers pass a test showing they understand that regulators disapprove. The…

That externalities, tragedies of the commons, and such exist is both obvious and trivial. That something governmentlike is required to solve them is less trivial but as obvious.

But even more broadly, isn’t one of the founding ideas of OB that we should be modest with regard to own beliefs? – in which case, the possibility of our own stupidity is well worth considering. Engineers who work with safety-critical systems assume that the users will, eventually, get it wrong, and therefore try to design so as to make it harder to make mistakes than to get it right.

As I understand it, the benefits are (i) a minor increase in productivity, since smoking apparently improves cognition in the short term, and (ii) a minor decrease in expenses supporting retired people. (This may, of course, be more than cancelled out by the drawback of people developing serious lung cancer long before they retire. I really have no idea how this amoral arithmetic works out; I just know that most other cases of paternalism are simpler.)

I really would like to go balls to the wall libertarian and say “if you want to snort coke day and night, you obviously have a different metric for ‘quality of life’ than me and you are probably maximizing it, so bully for you”. But I can’t take that stance if that person is treated in an emergency room with public money.

I’d say if you argue that paternalism is altruistic you are arrogant – and that the government only exists (as per Balan’s post) to correct market failures, where paternalism and redistribution exist only to the extent that they are a subset of that market correcting function. Consumers are acting only in their personal best interest; even with the regulators’ bias they are closer to acting in society’s best interest.