RALEIGH – Politicians and activists of a certain mindset look across the ocean to Europe for examples of what’s wrong with America and what to do about it. Those of a certain other mindset cast the same gaze but see answers to different questions: what’s right with America and what not to do about it.
I am decidedly in the latter camp, offering only a couple of major exceptions in the areas of school choice and tax policy. The latest foolishness from the continent makes me particularly worried because it sounds so strikingly like policies endorsed by some North Carolina lawmakers and education officials: efforts to combat soft-drink marketing aimed at schoolchildren.
While some critics of soda machines and cola ads mouth a broadly anti-capitalist critique, the usual justification for banning them is childhood obesity. In Europe, soft-drink companies themselves decided that the prospect of regulators blaming them for kiddie flab was so dire that they needed to announce last week a “voluntary” ban on advertising to children under 12. They also said they would eliminate soda machines in primary schools while increasing the availability of non-carbonated drinks in secondary schools.
There are two reasons to resent the policy outcome in Europe and to fear its emulation in North Carolina. One involves pragmatism, the other principle.
The pragmatic objection to such regulation (or self-regulation by threat of force) is that it consumes scarce resources on the wrong goal. I won’t deny that too many children are drinking too many soft drinks, but let’s put it in some perspective. This isn’t the major cause of childhood obesity. Lack of exercise is. If children spent more time outside playing, rather than inside watching TV or manipulating their video controllers, it wouldn’t matter as much whether they had a few more sodas than they should. They would burn off the extra calories. Fixating on the availability of soft drinks and fast food, rather than on a lack of assertive parenting and strenuous physical education, isn’t just unwise. It’s counterproductive.
The other objection here is one of principle. While one might make the argument that marketing products within government schools is an appropriate area for public legislation or regulation, an attack on advertising in that case serves as a blow to the bulwarks that protect the right to commercial communication everywhere. In the European case, the initial thrust of activism may have been limited to controlling what is said or sold at the schoolhouse, but the new policy isn’t limited to its confines. If regulators can force soft-drink makers to ban an entire category of ads, the precedent will likely lead to more-sweeping regulatory proposals in the future which, if enacted, will whittle away still more at our personal freedom.
Advertising to children is not a villainous act. Indeed, there are some authors who even argue that such advertising helps more than it hurts families by reducing the price and improving the quality of the products they consume, while ensuring that children actually like the clothes and enjoy the toys they are given.
As Forest Gump might say, Europe is as Europe does. Let’s be smart enough not to commit the same mistakes in the land of the free.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.