THINK OF ALL THE BEHAVIOUR CRYING OUT TO BE CONTROLLED THROUGH TAXATION.

Economists, most of whom appear to spend their time creating fancy arguments for bigger and more interventionist government, have identified another aspect of human behaviour that needs to be controlled and taxed. They are called “internalities.”

Tobacco use creates externalities because it imposes costs on health care. But there’s an “alternative formulation” that MIT economist Jonathan Gruber more than a decade ago said provides “a new rationale for government and legal intervention.” The state needs to control the “internalities” that operate within individual humans and drive them to consume things they should not consume and do things they maybe should not do.

The inventor of the word, a student of the infamous anti-free-will crusader and behaviour engineer B.F. Skinner, described internalities as “a within-person externality … which occurs when a person underweighs or ignores a consequence of his or her own behaviour for him- or herself.”

Think of all the seemingly bad behaviours and irrational internalities that might need to be controlled through taxation.

Like sugar. The World Health Organization recently concluded that the way to reduce obesity and other health problems is to bring in a tax on sugar. The WHO concluded that raising sugar prices by 20 per cent should do the job. “People don’t need any sugar in their diet,” says the WHO.

As with the carbon tax, the objective of the sugar tax is to get people to reduce their sugar consumption by a targeted amount. Canada’s carbon plan, for example, is to reduce carbon emissions by 30 per cent by 2030. The WHO sugar objective is to get people to cut their sugar intake down to below 10 per cent of their total calorie intake.

The sugar tax will do double duty. It will reduce externality costs associated with obesity and diabetes — and offset the internal burden faced by individuals who like their Twinkies and sodas yet can’t stop buying them.

The tax collected from the sugar tax should be used to provide assistance to producers of fruits and other natural sugar products, just as Canada will use carbon-tax cash to invest in green energy.

The WHO also advocates applying such “fiscal measures” to products containing saturated fats and salt as part of a global plan to increase the health and well-being of all the world’s peoples.

Of course, once big government starts looking at fixing internalities there can be no end to the degree of intervention. Two U.S. economists, Mario Rizzo and Douglas Glen Whitman, call the attack on internalities “the new paternalism,” in which governments attempt to offset individual “cognitive errors and biases.” Knock, knock. Who’s there? We’re from the government and we’re here to check on your internal cognitive errors and biases.

Canadian policy-makers are contemplating a new Internet tax to resolve the perennial need for more Canadian content in Canadian media. The externality is that Internet users bypass Canadian content. Internally, due to cognitive errors, they may prefer U.S. content but not be able to break their habits. Time to tax, with the money collected recycled back into the Canadian content space.

Will it ever end? No.