Listen to you liberals, yearning for totalitarian control. Ceausescu, that great Romanian liberal, limited the people to 1400 calories a day as I recall, perhaps you should try that in stead of just limiting sugar and soda.
Ceausescu was a socialist (the opposite of a liberal) who favoured totalitarian government control of the economy instead of a free market (again, the opposite of a liberal).
And since a socialist, centrally-directed economy is bound to fail, it is not surprising he had a problem of scarcity, thus he had no choice but to limit what the population could consume. (Well, he did have a choice, but that choice would have been abandoning socialism and opening up to a liberal free-market economy.)
The problem with sugar in the free market is not one of scarcity but of plenty. There is too much of it available too cheaply, and people overconsume to the point of ill effects on their health. In a free market, that would be nobody's business but the consumers, happy to keep gorging themselves, and the manufacturers, happy to keep a tidy profit stuffing the populace with marshmallows.
Except, of course, for externalities.
The harm or benefit from that transaction normally accrues to the vendor and the purchaser. When the harm or the benefit spills over onto the rest of the population, that is an
externality, either positive or negative. In this case, over-consumption of sugar weakens the population and imposes costs on other individuals as a result.
THAT gives us a free market mandate to reduce sugar consumption by making it more expensive to do so, and a mandate to collect the revenue from doing it to offset those negative externalities.
Not one damn socialist thing about it. That argument is entirely from conventional free-market principles going straight back to Adam Smith.
