Hillarious. I’ve always suspected as much, I’ve just never had the econ skills to crunch the numbers myself.

The Register adds up all the “costs” various Nanny State groups say a given vice costs British society (read: smoking, drinking, drugs, etc.). And the paper finds that if you take all of these busybody organizations at their word, vice costs society more money than actually exists. The paper notes that its figures don’t even include costs associated with accidents, disease, and pensions.

Someone should sit down and compute the same kind of stats for annual deaths. My guess is, if you add up all the deaths each year that groups like MADD, CSPI, ONDCP, and various other alarmist groups claim are associated with various bad habits in this country, you’ll get a number that’s actually greater than the total number of annual deaths.

Amusing as it is to point out the inflated claims of these groups, the unfortunate thing is that when healthists then take those claims to policy makers, our public officials often take them at face value, and then make laws that put restraints on individual liberty in the name of saving the public money. Such measures are wrong in principle, of course. But they’re also wrong for the obvious practical reasons.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 18th, 2006 at 11:08 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Nanny State, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.