There’s a wonderful exchange in the Coen brothers’ classic O Brother, Where Art Thou, when the trio of escaped convicts seek shelter with one’s brother. Who promptly betrays them to the police. But Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro) is less enraged by his brother’s betrayal, than by the discovery that fellow escapee Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) has stolen a watch from his treacherous kinsman.
Pete: You stole from my kin!
Ulysses: Who was fixin’ to betray us.
Pete: You didn’t know that at the time.
Ulysses: So I borrowed it till I did know.
Pete: That don’t make no sense!
As Pete intuitively senses but is unable to clearly articulate, there are some arguments which are self-evidently ridiculous — even if it’s difficult to explain exactly why.
Such was the case when a hatchet-faced, nanny-state inquisitor went on the warpath against… cakes.
‘If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them.’
Who is this co-worker from hell? Who is this whining, snivelling infant demanding that the rest of the world forfeits small pleasures because she has no self-control?
It is none other than the head of the Food Standards Agency, Susan Jebb, who is in the Times today comparing cakes to passive smoking […]
Jebb argued that passive smoking inflicted harm on others ‘and exactly the same is true of food’.
Like Ulysses MCGill’s attempted defence for theft, that don’t make no sense!
To inflict something on someone implies that it is done without their consent. In that sense – and leaving aside the question of whether wisps of secondhand smoke are actually harmful – passive smoking doesn’t inflict harm on a person who knowingly goes to a smoky pub. The same is obviously true of someone who offers you a cake. If they held you down and physically shoved it down your throat, that would be a different matter, but surely that is already illegal under some law or other?
But, in what seems suspiciously like a colossal case of projection, Jebb claims that the very sight of a piece of cake will turn rational adults into slobbering, gluttonous cake-zombies.
Since Jebb doesn’t want people to see cakes in the flesh, it is no great surprise that she doesn’t want people to see them on television either. She told the Times that advertising of junk food was ‘undermining people’s free will’ and insisted restrictions were ‘not about the nanny state’.
Except that it very much is about the nanny state.
Making it illegal for food companies to tell consumers about their products is the ‘nanny state’. And no, what you’re describing is not a ‘market failure […] We’ve ended up with a complete market failure because what you get advertised is chocolate and not cauliflower.’
Does she think there is a huge latent demand for cauliflower? Does she believe that a nationwide marketing campaign for it would lead to people snacking on cauliflower instead of chocolate? Economists would predict that such an advertising blitz would, at best, lead to vegetable eaters consuming slightly less swede and slightly more cauliflower, but let’s test it. Let the Food Standards Agency put some of its £143 million budget into advertising vegetables and see how it goes.
As any parent could tell this loony fanatic, no amount of persuasion is going to persuade someone to eat brussels sprouts instead of a Peanut Slab.
Apparently, Jebb is on The Times Health Commission because of course she is. I must admit that I didn’t know she’s also been running the Food Standards Agency since 2021. I was familiar with her mainly as an activist-academic who keeps getting taxpayer-funded jobs, so I can’t say I’m shocked to hear that she’s ended up in charge of a bloated, Blair-era government agency that never needed to be created in the first place and has long since deviated from its original purpose to become a soapbox for the paternalist elite.
These gimlet-eyed inquisitors’ perpetual and unpunished delusions of infallibility are partly explained by what is known as “public choice theory”. In essence, public choice theory argues that, firstly, voters largely fail to effectively monitor the behaviour of governments, while governments are making decisions that always involve other peoples’ money rather than their own.
The outcome of both is inevitable.
Public choice theory provides a plausible explanation for why governments fail to deliver what is expected of them […] It explains why bureaucracies become ever more bloated and taxes rise ever higher, even under governments which come to power on a ticket of deregulation and smaller government. It explains why bureaucracies are so resistant to budget cuts and why it tends to be frontline services, rather than management, which bear the brunt of such cuts if and when they arrive. It explains why an organisation like the Food Standards Agency can go from having a tiny staff investigating restaurant poisonings to having a staff of 2,000, a budget of £135 million and a mission that has expanded to campaigning against salt, fat and eating crisps during football matches.
Spectator Australia
There’s only one real solution: eat cake and tell ‘em to get stuffed.
