Salt and Freedom

Monica Potts says FDA regulation of the salt content of prepared foods won’t impair our liberty:

Mario Rizzo missed the point yesterday when he wrote in the Christian Science Monitor that the government is trying to regulate how much salt we eat. Obviously, that’s not what it’s doing with this new FDA initiative. What it is trying to do is regulate the amount of salt companies put in a serving of food. People are as free to buy salt and add it to meals as they ever were. Many of the coming health-care reform provisions regulate companies, not people. The idea that that’s somehow bad for our ability to operate freely in the world is ridiculous.

“Ridiculous” seems too strong to me. Clearly, the goal here is to get people to eat less salt. And it’s true that once we accept that concern for public health is a legitimate public concern we are opening the door in principle to a lot of government activity. On the other hand, even though a lot of people have libertarian instincts about novel paternalistic measures relatively few people have a consistent view in the other direction. Government policy encourages vaccinations against infectious diseases and you never see anyone agitating for the right of poor people to use SNAP to buy tax-free cigarettes.

The basic issue with salt regulation, I think, is the one highlighted in Tom Slee’s No-one Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart. Once you get beyond a certain set of generic commodities, it’s just not the case that the free market provides you with an infinite array of choices. At my supermarket, you can buy cottage cheese with a lot of salt added or you can buy a disgusting no-salt-added alternative product. If what you really want is something with 85% of the salt of the high-salt version, you’re out of luck. Not because of any insidious corporate conspiracy, but because it doesn’t make economic sense to try to precisely meet an infinite variety of preferences.

In the case of salt, it’s a lot easier to add salt to something you find not quite salty enough, but hard to remove salt if you’d be happier (or equally happy) with less. But the market would punish a company whose product only tasted good to most people if you added extra salt of your own. The minority who prefers it with less salt is probably going to be out of luck. Force people onto the lower-salt equilibrium, meanwhile, and though some folks will add the salt back in many will probably find themselves cutting their sodium intake and not minding the difference at all. I think trying to sell this kind of “nudge” measure as somehow a form of libertarianism is pretty silly, but it’s worth emphasizing that the options facing consumers in the market for branded consumer goods is going to be pretty sharply constrained however public policy structures the market. Insofar as it’s possible for regulatory measures to create large public health gains (my understanding is that it’s actually unclear if cutting salt will do that) then that’s something I’m supportive of.