The US and Britain: The Attack of the Nanny State?

Two weeks ago, the US Senate approved legislation empowering the federal government with sweeping powers to oversee tobacco products. In essence, Uncle Sam will regulate matters such as the amount of nicotine in a cigarette, not to mention how the cigarette is packaged, signed, and marketed. After 50 years of warnings from the surgeon general, Big Tobacco has finally succumbed to a smoking President. Now, if only the National Rifle Association would fall at the feet of a President with a smoking gun, maybe we would get some sanity over the interpretation of the Second Amendment's "right to bear arms".

I have to declare an interest. Not only am I a reformed smoker – I was a 60-a-day man back in the 1970s, but I am also a trustee of a cancer charity. Therefore, you will not find me defending the rights of the tobacco industry or cigarette smokers. In fact, on a trip to Australia some ten years ago, I welcomed the typical Aussie frankness. The message on a packet of their cigs was to the point: “Smoking Kills”.

However, will Americans be asking a bigger question? Do they want a nanny state, where risk taking is minimized to cover obtuseness, as the government seeks to protect the citizen from everything that they, not the citizen, considers potentially dangerous? Will tobacco regulation be the thin end of the wedge?

In Britain, The Nanny State by Robert Huntington examined the almost obsessive nannying of the Tony Blair and, briefly, Gordon Brown Governments. Huntington writes scathingly about the chief proponents of the movement and argues that bodies such as the Health and Safety Executive, with its army of "five-a-day [fruit and vegetable] coordinators" and "smoking cessation officers", are merely a bunch of conmen who have seized a slice of the Treasury's cash reserves without doing anything productive in return. Huntington argues that nannying is ultimately dangerous, as freedoms are continually eroded while funds and resources are increasingly wasted.

One wonders whether the freedom issue over tobacco legislation might reach the Supreme Court and, if so, if the legislation be rejected towards the end of Obama’s first term. In the economic sphere, I have been astonished at the acceptance by mainstream America of the Federal Government’s takeover of the banking system, a move that is socialist from any viewpoint and attacks the norms of American business freedom and ideology. In the social sphere, will the Obama administration be tempted to make further inroads into American life on the basis of safety?

The proposed healthcare legislation will get a much harder ride in Congress than the new tobacco laws, where I am sure Republican objections to charges of nannying will find support in some Democrat ranks. And, fortunately for the US, separation of powers prevents the executive from ramming through unwelcome legislation. Nevertheless, Congressmen might look at the British experience before they decide to get carried away with petty regulations, passed in the fervour of “we know better than you.”

Comments

[Jonny]

Bit daft this question as it stands. Any assessment of whether government regulation is good or bad needs to be taken on a case by case basis. Universal healthcare is hardly a 'petty regulation'.

And Huntington might want to ask mill workers from the 19th Century if they wished they had Health an Safety Laws as their friend was disemboweled by a broken weaving belt.

The problem is Britain is not the idea of nannying, it was that much New Labour (and Thaterchite) state activity was geared towards avoiding more costly intervention by the actual state (or, more simply being able to keep the cost off the right parts of the books). The intellectual stupidity of it was that most 'regulation' was designed to make it look less lie a 'nanny state' (state being the problem word, not nanny) so it was de-regulation via regulation!

The argument Huntington missed was that the 'Nanny state' he identifies was a horrible amalgam of actual state regulation (usually fairly effective, if inevitably expensive) and silly public/private quangos that according to the Blair / Brown axis were better than the state by the very nature of their private links and cost/profit analysis. There is no better example of this logic than the FSA, or the foundation Hospitals system (and the new NHS IT scheme) or the Learning and Skills council.

So, the problem isn't the 'nanny state' it's that the nanny state isn't being managed properly. The ongoing pull between state intervention and limits on the broad concept of freedom is the whole bloody point of democracy.

So, no doubt given the general dislike of 'big govt' will crop up in the US, but the problem for the Obama admin isn't whether people will see it as a thin end of the wedge because they will, but it's the right thing to do, so the issue whether they can properly articulate a perfectly reasonable argument that sometimes state intervention (to regulate guns, smoking, or provide universal health care) is a good thing.

I've yet to read an academic paper that argues private healthcare is better for the population than public healthcare paid through taxation, nor have I seen a Republican argument against healthcare plans that isn't, in effect, arguing that it will put some private insurance companies out of business, which is hardly the best argument against the plans.

Plus, point of order please, the Obama economic plan ISN'T socialist from 'any viewpoint' and to describe it as socialist is to give the word the most capacious meaning. Not all state intervention is 'socialist' especially as in this case when the idea is to (stupidly) sell the banks back to the people who screwed em up in the first place. In your reading does the 'socialist' policy includes the govt policy towards the car industry? I'd agree all this is rather an anathema to the consensus in U.S. economic and social history, but that's something they should be ashamed of. If there is any decent criticism of the Obama administration is that they haven't acted enough.

Just because an Americans say something is socialist doesn't make it nay more true that if they some something is about freedom.