Messaging
I notice that the American “surgeon general” wants to put cancer warnings on all bottles of alcohol (to be sold in the “free market”). This would of course be accompanied by punitive new “health taxes.” As usual, the “science” behind this is false, and moderate drinking, especially of wine and ale, has been shown to improve health and increase longevity in many studies. Morbid alcoholism causes health problems, however.
We have now sixty years of false information in support of many product bans, and we have come to assume that Nanny State — which always has its own interests at heart, and never those of the public — must desecrate the packaging for all the most popular comestibles.
One of my little boys once showed enterprise by supplying sets of fake, stick-on labels to be sold in corner stores, which he designed and computer-printed himself. His talent for typography made me quite proud. These appliqués exactly matched the cigarette labels the Canadian guvmint had “mandated,” but read, i.e., “Cigarettes cause eating disorders in fish,” and, “Sex while smoking can lead to pregnancy,” and more simply, “Have another!” … It was much more profitable than lemonade stands; I am trying to remember why he stopped.
A clever lad, of independent mind, he was also a campaigner for child labour.
But we will need a new generation of health messages, for the public authorities like to waste our money by ordering the capitalists to alter the design of their warnings, constantly, to make them more alarming and repulsive. I’m sure they have large departments for this, employing many otherwise unemployable people, to extend their social welfare budgets and discourage trade.
I was thinking they could design one for surgeons general. It would read, “Being hanged from a lamp-post can endanger your health.”