John Robson: The Futility of Warning Labels and the Encroaching Nanny State

Commentary

Apparently we are to have warning labels on alcohol. What’s next? Warning labels on lions?

The latter would be harder to affix for precisely the obvious reason that they’re not needed because everyone has known it for tens of thousands of years: Lions are dangerous. Like booze.

I sympathize with Sen. Patrick Brazeau’s personal struggles with alcohol and those of other people. Millions and millions, in fact. But is it really beneficial to have government scribbling misleading slogans about things everybody already knows all over everything in hopes of terrifying us into passive misery?

Brazeau, sponsor of the bill, said: “This bill is not about prohibition or nanny state overreach. It is about empowering consumers with facts.” Bosh. What facts we didn’t already have? Think of the pejorative terms for “drunk” and “drunkard” in countless languages ever since humans discovered fermentation and promptly began abusing it. The question is whether the government should nag us pointlessly until it drives us to drink.

Besides, the preamble to Brazeau’s Bill S-202 starts, “Whereas Parliament recognizes that a direct causal link exists between alcohol consumption and the development of fatal cancers…” But he himself said: “It does ruin lives and kills people. It’s certainly not good for mental health. Personally, it led me down a very, very, very dark path, so dark I just wanted to put an end to my life. Luckily I failed.”

So it’s not about cancer, is it? It’s about alcoholism. Which is a real and terrible problem. But it is not therefore true that alcohol is “certainly not good for mental health.” For most people, it’s relaxing and an aid to socialization. A friend once claimed plausibly that it helped create civilization, because people can work a lot harder and longer knowing a pint of proper 1420 waits at dinner.

It is also tragically true that for a significant minority, perhaps around 10 percent, booze is poison. It will dependably ruin their lives if they drink. But again, we all know it already, right? Millennia ago, Deuteronomy 21:20 told parents of a hopelessly recalcitrant son to inform the elders that he’s “stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.”

Nowadays, we prefer gentler interventions than stoning. But clearly, everybody knew routinely getting pie-eyed was a dreadful idea thousands of years ago.

Ironically, “drunkard” is one of those stigmatizing words we’re no longer meant to use, never mind “rubby” or “alco.” So the same state that wants us to grasp the problem forbids frank talk, another reason it’s as insulting and dangerous to claim we won’t know about “alcohol abuse” if Big Nurse doesn’t tell us as to claim none of us can be trusted with a tipple.

Remember Tocqueville’s warning that “it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life” because instead of pushing them to open resistance, “their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated” as the state “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform,” which “does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

Given its neo-Puritan impulse to stamp out fun, the nanny state constantly encourages us to regard everything as too dangerous for us to handle. Where they expect to find people with the courage to defy unjust authority I do not know. Perhaps to them it’s a feature not a bug of a paralyzing obsession with safety that ironically endangers us. Including hectoring highway billboards saying don’t tailgate in a blizzard.

True, a great many drivers seem comatose, or to have acquired their licence from a box of Crackerjacks not some responsible testing authority. But that authority was … the same government now wagging its serpent’s tongue at us.

At this point, I may well be accused of indifference to human suffering or even advocating putting gin on your cornflakes. But abuse is not argument.

Once upon a time, we in free societies trusted folk wisdom and common sense, the courage and judgment of citizens tempered by often painful experience. And we resorted to government only to deter, quash, or punish force and fraud, and intervene when authentic transaction cost, holdout, or free-rider problems interfered with private action.

Drinking to excess is not in any of those categories. Yes, it’s bad. Like overeating. Shall we have warning labels on food? We already do, state-mandated and hence illegible, incomprehensible, wrong, and futile. Unlike growing public awareness that you should be active throughout the day, not hyperactive at the table.

As for lions, a label saying they cause cancer in California won’t make anyone smarter or safer.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.