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There's no end to that road. What people do in the bedroom affects their health as well. Shall we tax the more risky sex practices?

• Akkuma 11y ago
  Why stop there? We might want to monitor people each day via fitbit like devices that report back the data to ensure everyone is exercising the recommended amount. We can then tax or reduce taxes for the applicable individuals. This could obviously be deemed a bit of a slippery slope fallacy, but I'd argue the above is probably more beneficial than taxing my soda if you truly want to reduce healthcare costs by having healthier individuals. But, who wants to go that far?
  • TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Personally, I would, if FitBit et al. were actually about health and not about sports-obsessed people bragging about their fitness activities. I definitely wouldn't mind being monitored for health with real-time advice on how to optimize it. As for the bedroom thing, this is a bad kind of slippery slope argument (not all slippery slope arguments are fallacies). It's ignoring the fact that penalizing soda is not a binary +health/-health decision but a complex tradeoff that includes the magnitude of expected gains and the probable sentiment of the public.
• nopinsight 11y ago
  There are two conflating issues in your example: privacy and economic externalities. Taxing soda does not violate anyone's privacy while monitoring sexual practices does. Although hard to imagine, if we can somehow develop a system to charge people more for unsafe sex while perfectly anonymizing it, I do not see how it would be different from carbon tax in principle.
• csours 11y ago
  Most sex practices are not a direct financial transaction. For the ones that do include a financial transaction, sure, tax it!