Tom Keane

Countless calories

Good news! The obesity crisis is over. A world of thinness, health, and vibrant living awaits — all thanks to your federal government. The Food and Drug Administration has just issued new rules requiring pretty much all of the restaurants we frequent — which is to say, chains — prominently post the calorie count of the dishes and drinks they serve.

Here’s a safe bet. Ten years from now, we’ll all be just as fat as ever. Or if not, the FDA’s new calorie-counting regulations will have nothing to do with it.

I know what you’re saying: “But Tom, I had no idea that a Friendly’s Forbidden Fudge Brownie Sundae has 970 calories! Until the FDA came along, I thought it was dietetic.”

Exactly. You knew the calorie count was up there. And you ordered it anyway. You just didn’t care, or perhaps you figured that you’d work it off with those supposedly daily trips to the gym that somehow occur at best once a week.

And if you did care, you didn’t need the feds to tell you. Many chains happily provide nutritional information and even if they don’t, a simple Internet search will give you the answers. The biggest impediment to eating right, quite frankly, isn’t that we’re ignorant about the facts.

I’ll admit, though, that sometimes calorie counts can surprise. New York City was one of the first jurisdictions to require restaurants display calories on their menu. I remember tucking into a steak and salad at a Manhattan Morton’s (and no, I wasn’t paying). A half-pound porterhouse? About 640 calories. But my iceberg lettuce salad? 770.

That’s when I gave up vegetables.

The FDA’s rules — required by Obamacare, by the way — come after a protracted process that saw more than a thousand comments and numerous revisions. Chains are covered, as well as movie theaters, vending machines, and grocery stores. Calories have to be posted. Other nutritional information needs to be available on request.

Those in favor of the new rules argue that with the information in front of them, consumers will make better decisions. I may walk into McD’s planning on a Bacon Clubhouse Burger, but when I see it has 720 calories, I’ll recoil, picking instead, say, a 480-calorie Grilled McWrap Chicken and Bacon.

Nice theory. But it doesn’t appear to happen.

In 2009, a year after New York began requiring labeling, researchers examined buying habits at restaurants in mostly low-income neighborhoods. More than a quarter of those surveyed said the food labeling law “influenced their choices.” Hurrah! But then they looked at what people actually bought, and nothing had changed. In other words, folks were lying! As the report drily observed, “Calorie information on menus appears to increase awareness of calorie content, but not necessarily the number of calories people purchase.” A second study came to the same conclusion — “no overall decline in calories purchased” — but, oddly, did find cuts at some chains (such as KFC) while at others (Subway) calorie consumption actually increased.

New York’s no outlier, either. After Seattle started to require nutrition labeling, researchers from Duke University examined purchases from a chain called Taco Time, concluding the “average calories per transaction were unaffected by the menu labeling.” On the other hand, a study for the National Bureau of Economic Research did find that Starbucks customers, at least, appeared to cut their calories — but by only 6 percent.

Why, you wonder, don’t people do what’s good for them? It’s the old cliché: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” Couple that with two other factors. First, after a while we become inured to information. Sulfites in wine? Tobacco causes cancer? Now we just ignore those warnings. Then too, one wonders whether calorie counting is a little bit last decade. Isn’t it carbs that really matter? No big deal. It’s not like we’d pay attention to those labels either.

This column originally appeared in The Boston Sunday Globe on November 30, 2014. 

Uber’s revolution will drive on

The revolution is over. Uber self-destructed. Time to get back in our taxis.

Or so some wish. But it’s not going to happen. Uber may be in trouble — and there will likely be much angst about customer privacy — but the revolution it spawned will continue.

The company that has become a synonym for travel (“Let’s uber home”) is facing a PR crisis, provoked by what were supposed to have been off-the-record comments at a private dinner. Senior executive Emil Michael, waxing on about unfair media coverage, talked about hiring investigators to dig up dirt on a journalist who was critical of the company. Media folks everywhere were horrified, naturally, because while they have no compunction about exposing others’ dark secrets, they think their own are off-limits. In any event, it’s not clear that Michael’s comments were really all that threatening; they may have just been a boozy, off-hand joke.

Still, like a Bill Cosby meme gone bad, Michael’s loose remarks were a tipping point of sorts, unleashing talk about Uber’s sexist, frat-boy reputation. Nerdy CEO Travis Kalanick, bragging about his new-found popularity with the opposite sex, once called the company “Boob-er.” A bizarre ad campaign in France featured female Uber drivers in scanty lingerie. And in 2012 the company ran a strange analysis using passenger data to track one-night stands.

So now we see customers contemplating whether to delete the app from their phones while others are calling for the heads of Uber’s executives. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, called Uber “the most ethically challenged company in Silicon Valley.”

Of course, Thiel is also an investor in Lyft, Uber’s pink-mustachioed nemesis.

Companies come and go, and Uber may or may not sort things out. The bigger question is whether the Uber scandals imperil the entire ride-sharing movement. And the reason comes down to privacy: Ride-sharing apps of all sorts know where their customers have been and where they’re going. Data like that can be put to use in some pretty nefarious ways — including attacking one’s critics. Ah, for the good old days of taxis, one thinks, when transactions were in cash and the driver never knew your name.

Uber managed to flame this fear with staffers apparently abusing a software program known as “God View,” one that allows users to follow the movement of their customers. Stories abound of Uber execs showing off “God View’’ at parties or tracking when someone will show up for a meeting.

Scary? Yes. But not as scary as this. If you have an android phone, go to google.com/locationhistory and log-in. There you’ll find a calendar. Click on any date and you’ll see a map showing every single place you have ever been for that day and how long you were there. It’s truly disturbing. Snooping spouses and snooping governments would have a field day.

All of which is to underscore a point most of us at least dimly know: Information about us is constantly being collected. Data from cellphones track our movements. Cameras on the streets see what we’re doing. When we purchase something with a credit card, there’s a record tied of what we bought. Cable companies know the movies we’re watching; e-book companies know what we’re reading; websites track the stories we view.

In this context, the data from ridesharing apps such as Uber’s God View are inconsequential. Indeed, even the anonymity of a traditional taxicab is disappearing. When you pay for your taxi with a credit card, your trip is recorded somewhere. And new apps such as Flywheel are seeking to help the taxicab industry by making it even more like Uber, Lyft, and their kin.

The issue, really, is not that the data are being collected, but how they’re being used. In the wake of the Uber scandal, Lyft tightened up its own rules on who has access to customer data. Politicians such as Senator Al Franken are asking questions. We’ve all recently become afraid of the National Security Agency. But the spies in our lives are everywhere. Private companies need the same tight limits we’d put on the government.

This column was first published in The Boston Globe on November 25, 2014.

Tax lessons from Japan are not so black and white

Japan has just recently become something of an economic test tube, and in a way that might seem to delight the anti-tax crowd (which, with the recent elections, is now known as “Congress”). In April, Japan increased its consumption tax from 5 percent to 8 percent. The following quarter, gross domestic production dropped by 7.3 percent. Last quarter — and contrary to the expectations of mainstream economists — it dropped another 1.6 percent. The conclusion? Increasing taxes caused a recession.

It’s certainly conceivable that the rise in taxes only correlates and didn’t cause the fall in GDP, but few in Japan — or from the rest of the world — are buying that. The tax hike was supposed to be one of a series that would eventually bring the rate next year to 10 percent. That next hike likely will be abandoned. Moreover, there appears to be nothing else except the tax hike that could have derailed Japan’s economy. And some — such as Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman — had been warning that the tax hike could imperil a struggling economy.

There are shades here of the Laffer Curve, the controversial Reagan-era proposition by economist Arthur Laffer. Laffer’s argument was that too-high taxes depressed economic growth, resulting in smaller tax collections. Conversely, he argued, cutting taxes could boost economic growth and thus, perhaps counterintuitively, increase tax collections.

Japan seems a clear-cut case of this. Those who wish for a smaller and less intrusive public sector can now use it as evidence that taxes hurt economies and so destroy jobs. Democrats and other advocates of greater government intervention, they would say, are actually supporting policies that hurt the very groups — for example, the unemployed — about whom they profess to care.

Well, yes and no. Japan’s sad experience does seem to prove that, all other things being equal, higher taxes can impede economic growth. But it doesn’t necessarily make the case that conservatives would hope.

For one, this may be a short blip in Japan’s economic history. The consumption tax increase was big. In retrospect, many think taking “baby steps” — a series of smaller hikes — would have been less traumatizing. And in any event, it’s likely that the nation’s businesses and people will eventually adjust and that economic life bounces back to normal. In the United States for instance, taxes rose in early 2013 with the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts (although the tax rise was well less than had originally been feared from what was then called the “fiscal cliff”). Sure enough, the boost in taxes appeared to hurt economic growth, with the economy remaining sluggish. But almost two years later, their impact is hard to discern. The economy is growing — at a healthy 3.5 percent annualized clip in the third quarter of 2014 — and the tax hikes are largely forgotten.

Also, some other nations (such as Denmark and Sweden) have significantly higher tax burdens than Japan — or, for that matter, the United States — yet enjoy much more robust growth. Granted, comparing countries like this is a little unfair; other factors aside from taxes likely account for the differences. But the point is that taxes are not the only influence over economic growth. In fact, it’s how you spend tax money that matters most.

Here’s where the Japan example falls apart for conservatives. Japan’s tax hike was supposed to be fiscally responsible. Urged upon it by the International Monetary Fund, it was imposed not to support wildly profligate new spending, but rather to help narrow the deficit. Arguably, if the new taxes had supported increased spending — say on infrastructure — or if Japan had simply continued to deficit spend, things might have been different. Instead, Japan’s penny-pinching (yen-pinching, actually) pushed it into recession.

In the United States, those on both sides of the aisle could learn a few lessons from Japan. Yes, tax hikes — especially those that are large and sudden — can thwart economic growth. But taxes are only one factor in explaining an economy. And indeed, fiscal prudence can also be a mistake. When economies are suffering or fragile, pump-priming and deficit spending can make a lot more sense than balancing the budget.

This column originally appeared in The Boston Sunday Globe on November 23, 2014.

The American Dream starts in your county

America fancies itself the “land of opportunity,” one of the key ways we define ourselves as a nation. Politicians of all stripes like to wax poetic about how their parents came to US shores with next to nothing, and now look — their kid might soon be running the country! Usually these heartwarming tales conclude with the line: “Only in America.”

Anecdotes notwithstanding, however, how good are we really at giving everyone a chance to be a success? It’s possible to answer that question — to measure “opportunity,” in fact. Since 2011, a bipartisan nonprofit called Opportunity Nation has been doing just that, looking at 16 different metrics to come up with a numerical summary of opportunity. It just released the 2014 edition of its Opportunity Index.

It turns out that opportunity varies from place to place. The Index ranks each state by the degree of opportunity it affords citizens. Massachusetts does well, ranking third from the top, just behind Vermont and Nebraska. The worst off is Nevada (maybe those anti-casino gambling folks were on to something). The Index also tracks how states have changed over the last four years (Massachusetts basically stayed the same.)

But the most important lesson I draw from the Index is this: It’s what happens on the local level that most profoundly affects a citizen’s degree of opportunity. And while it is true that much of our national politics is broken, state and local governments continue to function well — meaning there is real optimism that smart state and local policies can change the trajectory of someone’s life.

Massachusetts may rank high, but not all areas within the Commonwealth are equal. The Index gives Middlesex and Norfolk Counties each a grade of A-. The Cape and Islands do well, too, getting Bs and As. The lowest ranked is Hampden County (Springfield) which gets a C. Suffolk County, home to Boston, does relatively poorly too, getting a C+.

How is it that some places do so much better than others? Because the metrics the Index uses are almost all community specific.

The 16 metrics the Index relies upon fall into three broad categories: the economy, education, and community and civic life. These measures include items such as the prevalence of violent crime, the rate of high school graduation, how many students go on to college, the percent of the population with access to the Internet, the number of readily available grocery stores and healthcare centers, the availability of preschool education, and housing prices. These, obviously, are not issues in which the federal government gets deeply engaged. But they are exactly the kinds of things governors, mayors, and town managers can greatly influence.

One place where federal policy matters, of course, is the economy. Measures of unemployment, poverty rates, and median wages play an important role in the Index. A national government that can create the conditions for strong and stable growth will have a profound impact on the opportunities an individual has. (To state the obvious, if there are no jobs available, then the opportunity to move into the middle class is bleak.) But even here, local action matters. States and communities vary widely in the health of their economies, and the reasons for those variations can be tied back to local policies: The quality of a region’s infrastructure, tax rates on businesses, the availability of a well-trained workforce, the ease of permitting, regulatory burdens, and so on. Get these right and business thrives. Jobs get created, wages rise and poverty declines.

The bottom line, simply, is that while what goes on in Washington may get the most media attention, the real action is at the state and local level. If states and communities can focus on improving the 16 measures that go into the Index, their scores will go up. And they will be giving their citizens a meaningful shot at the American Dream.

This column was first published in The Boston Globe on November 18, 2014.

Democrats’ coalition will rise again

Standing in front of a cheering crowd last Tuesday, her family and friends behind her, New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen gave a victory speech straight out of the Democratic playbook.

“With the new term you’ve given me, I will fight to make sure that students can refinance their student loans,” the reelected senator told a cheering crowd. “I will fight for a smart energy policy . . . I will fight for a minimum wage . . . I will fight for equal pay for equal work . . . I will fight for smart, serious national security policies . . . I will always fight for a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions. And . . . I will never stop fighting to make sure that everyone in New Hampshire has access to quality affordable health care.”

Let’s see:

Young adults? Check.

Environmentalists? Check.

Low-income folks? Check.

Working women? Check.

Pease Air National Guard Base and Portsmouth Naval Shipyard? Check.

Pro-choice crowd? Check.

Health care advocates? Check.

Democrats have been doing this for years, winning by appealing to individual constituencies, building a coalition that can add up to majority. It’s a tried-and-true strategy, and for Shaheen, it worked — helped no doubt by scathing ads ripping challenger Scott Brown as a carpetbagger who’s only in it for himself.

Elsewhere, though, it failed. Democrats lost hugely and the GOP won big. Interest group politics weren’t enough to overcome overwhelming voter gloom about the future of the nation.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m with Shaheen on almost all of the issues she cited. Yet some elections are about more than just pet peeves and concerns, and this was one of them. Americans are deeply worried about the economy and the direction of the country. A CBS exit poll on Election Day, for instance, found 71 percent thought the economy was doing badly. Even more, 78 percent were fearful it would do worse in the future. Only 22 percent thought life for the next generation would be better than it was today, and only 28 percent said they were better off now than two years ago. It’s little wonder, with concerns such as these, that the incumbent party got the boot.

The good news for Democrats, however, is that someday soon things will turn around. It’s the nature of politics. Moreover, voter perceptions notwithstanding, things really are getting better.

Monthly data that came out three days after the election showed that employers added 214,000 jobs in October, the ninth month in a row with gains of 200,000 or more. The unemployment rate fell to a six-year low of 5.8 percent. In the third quarter, gross domestic product increased at a 3.5 percent rate. Inflation remained low — indeed, the price of gasoline has fallen by almost a dollar to below three dollars, a true boon to consumers. And the stock market continued to hit new highs.

Yes, things aren’t perfect. The rebound is slower than we’d like. Moreover, labor participation rates are still low (meaning many have simply given up looking for a job) and earnings for the middle class are rising slowly, if at all. Still, the latest data showed a drop in unemployment even as labor participation improved and concerns about economic inequality would seem to be a natural for Democrats.

So why didn’t Democrats get credit for this in 2014? Some argue that people just didn’t “feel” the rebound, and there’s much truth to that. Dry statistics weren’t enough to counter the waves of fear from the Great Recession that continue to wash over us.

Eventually those waves will recede. Thing will settle down and the mood of pessimism will lift. Politics tends to go in cycles. Democrats were in ascendency six years ago; Republicans are up now. That too will change as broad worries give way to narrow concerns, creating the perfect opportunity for Democrats to rebuild their coalition piece by piece by piece.

This column was first published in The Boston Globe on November 11, 2014.

Get rid of Mass. bottle deposits

It’s time to get rid of bottle deposits.

Bay State proponents for an expanded bottle deposit bill suffered a lopsided loss on Tuesday: More than 73 percent of voters said no. That marked a stunning turnaround: As recently as mid-August, polling showed 62 percent favored “updating” the law so that it would also cover non-carbonated beverages. After grocery chains and the beverage industry started running their well-funded ads, however, sentiment rapidly shifted. The referendum was crushed by a margin of 40 points.

So do proponents give up the ghost? They’ll resist it. For one, they’ll point to the imbalance in spending. The “yes” folks put perhaps a million dollars into their effort. The opposition spent about eight times as much. Then too, they’ll point to the industry’s misleading ads, especially one which asserted that 90 percent of all Massachusetts residents have access to curbside recycling. The correct figure is 64 percent. Absent such a misrepresentation, they’ll say, they could have had a chance.

Perhaps. The bottle bill proponents may have been outspent, but they were also beneficiaries of an enormous amount of free media, myriad endorsements (including the Globe’s), and active support by the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. Moreover, the opponents’ misleading ad earned a raft of bad press, hurting perhaps as much as it helped.

It wasn’t merely money and ads that sent the expanded bottle bill to defeat. The notion of deposits on containers is deeply problematic, a flawed scheme from the 1980s. I first became disillusioned with the law when, living in Boston, I’d find my trash bags razored by bottle-pickers, debris strewn about. Now I’m in an apartment building, and single-stream recycling is — literally — down the hall: one chute for trash, one for recyclables. Trudging to the store to return bottles and cans makes no sense. From my point of view — and that of many others, I suspect — the expanded bottle bill would have been simply more money out of my pocket.

So what happens now? It’s a safe bet that Massachusetts legislators are not about to introduce and debate a similar bill. The voters have spoken loudly and clearly; elected officials cross them at their peril. And if bottle deposit advocates want to make another run at a referendum, they’ll have to wait six years — until 2020. (The state constitution requires such a waiting period once a measure has been defeated by voters.)

So do we just stick with the status quo? Advocates were absolutely correct in one thing: The existing law is antiquated and in need of updating. But since that’s not going to happen, it’s time to come up with some new approaches.

Expanding “pay-as-you-throw” programs would be one approach. Now in place in more than 140 Massachusetts communities, the concept is to charge homeowners a fee for each bag of trash they put out, while collecting recyclables for free. According to case studies by the state, such programs can dramatically increase recycling.

At the same time, we could follow the example of Delaware, which abandoned its bottle deposit law in 2010 and moved to what the state calls “universal recycling.” Initially funded with a fee on beverages, all businesses have to participate, and all household trash haulers have to offer residents single-stream recycling. Since the bottle bill ended, the percent of Delaware’s trash that is recycled has climbed from 33.7 to 40.1, according to the state.

Ideas like these have been around for a while, introduced in the Legislature and then dying silently in one committee or another. The pessimist in me fears similar inaction this time around. Proponents are doubtless feeling miffed and not in any mood to cooperate while the beverage industry is flush with victory, thinking it doesn’t have to do anything. That would make for a missed opportunity on the part of both sides, however. Bamboozled or not, voters shot down the expanded bottle bill because they believed recycling is a better approach. With a new governor in pace and a change in leadership at the state Senate, perhaps it’s possible to rally environmentalists and the beverage industry around innovative solutions for a persistent problem — one that, the referendum’s results notwithstanding, still needs to be fixed.

This column was first published in The Boston Sunday Globe on November 9, 2014.

Tom Menino’s keys to effectiveness

The last few days’ outpouring of affection for late Boston Mayor Tom Menino is more than deserving but tells us little, really, about why he was so effective as mayor. As hagiography eventually gives way to biography — and Menino’s life deserves close, dispassionate study — one thing we will learn, I believe, is that his success was not merely his love of people, dedication to Boston, tireless work ethic, or sharp intellect (and yes, it was quite sharp). It was his ability to accumulate power, wield it, and put it to good ends. Few politicians know how to do so. Menino was a master.

Today’s Election Day, and while we are preoccupied with the horse races here and around the nation — Charlie Baker or Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, Scott Brown or Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, Republican US Senate or not — we don’t ask ourselves often enough what really makes for a good politician. How does one deliver and another not? It’s not enough just to represent the right values or policy positions. Politician face a thicket of opposition to accomplishing anything. Getting through that thicket requires deploying a set of tools that might make us uncomfortable. It means at times being manipulative, disingenuous, tough, and mean. It means forcing your will against the will of others.

It’s either that or fail.

“I’m just like a fox,” Lyndon Baines Johnson — another master in the art of power — once said. “I can see the jugular in any man and go for it.”

Menino was as good a fox, if not better. He had a reputation as thin-skinned and a holder of grudges. Much of that was manufactured. In his memoirs, for instance, the late mayor recounts “haranguing” recalcitrant state reps on an issue: “I put on my hot-under-the-collar act.” And it was an act — but scarily good. So too, people learned not to cross the mayor. “Fear is power,” he observed. He valued loyalty as a way to build his own strength while also tamping down opposition. Contribute money or time to an opponent — he tracked both carefully — and you’d be frozen out.

He built up a powerful political machine, and expected everyone to play a part. Those who didn’t were gone. The result was that in 2012 he was able to field, by his count, 2,289 volunteers for Elizabeth Warren’s Senate race. Candidates “drew a lesson from our wins,” Menino wrote. “‘Team Menino’ could make you or break you.”

Menino also believed a key to power was understanding exactly the mood of the electorate. He was constantly on the streets, meeting people and learning from them. “I’m a bad talker . . . but a good listener,” he said of himself. Because people knew him, they trusted him. But he also learned how far he could push on any issue — and when, sometimes, to reverse himself. Tagged as an “incrementalist,” he was wary of getting too far ahead of the public mood. “[C]hange is possible,” he wrote, “but in small pieces and in slow time.”

One can go on. He paid attention to the details, particularly when it came to development: “I never relaxed my grip.” He knew how to manipulate. Battling Robert Kraft over a football stadium in South Boston, he vowed, “I’d play the suburban card.” Even more, “I’d also play the class card.” And Menino also surrounded himself with advisers and staff — Robert “Skinner” Donohue, Edward F. Jesser, David Passafaro, Peter Welsh, and many others — who understood as he did the importance of building and maintaining power.

But power without purpose is pointless.

Menino had an exceptionally well-developed sense of fairness and empathy for the downtrodden and outcast, gays and lesbians, minorities, women, and immigrants. He understood the need to mesh the new (such as explosive downtown development) with the old (including preservation and keeping Boston’s sense of its own history). He believed cities had to be safe, a necessary prerequisite to keeping and building their residential and business bases. He knew that education mattered most to the least well-off; it was their path out of poverty.

He used the power he had accumulated to make progress on all these fronts and more. It wasn’t only his caring that Menino leaves as a legacy. It was his ability to get things done.

This column was first published in The Boston Globe on November 4, 2014.

The vice squad

The town of Westminster tries to squelch the right to make bad decisions

Let’s see if I’ve got this right: I can now purchase alcohol on Sunday mornings. Pot is about to become legal everywhere. Casino gambling is soon to be just a subway ride from home. But if the town of Westminster has its way, it would be illegal for anyone to buy a cigarette.

So what are we? A nanny state? Libertarians? Or just confused?

Massachusetts used to prohibit alcohol sales on Sunday. Thanks to Governor Mitt Romney, that ban was lifted in 2003, allowing sales at noon (kind of like Nixon in China, it took a teetotaler to kill the blue laws). And a new state law last month further relaxed things, permitting liquor stores to open at 10 a.m. — just in time to make those church services tolerable!

Meanwhile, the pot legalization juggernaut proceeds apace. Recreational use is already allowed in Washington state and Colorado. On Tuesday a voter referendum will likely make it legal in the nation’s capital. And Massachusetts is heading in the same direction. The Bay State decriminalized marijuana in 2008, OK’d medical use in 2012, and a possible referendum in 2016 may well legalize weed completely.

Booze and pot. Two vices call for a third, and that third is gambling. As with liquor during Prohibition and pot even now, gambling used to be flat-out illegal. It was immoral, operators of gambling dens were criminals, and those who frequented them were low-lifes. But then we discovered the fiscal benefits of lotteries — the Massachusetts lottery pulls in $4.9 billion a year. That, in turn, led to the discovery of the economic benefits of casinos which — barring an unexpected result in the upcoming election — will lead to three casinos and one slots parlor around the state. Funny, isn’t it, how money trumps morality?

These tales stand in stark contrast to what’s going on in Westminster, a small town (population 7,765) 60 miles northwest of Boston. Its public health commission just drafted regulations making illegal the sale of everything from chewing tobacco, cigarettes, cigars, and even e-cigs. The town appears to be the first in the nation to seek such a ban, and it seems a crazy, over-reaching outlier.

Perhaps not.

Viewed through one lens, Massachusetts — and the nation — is becoming more libertarian, seemingly conceding that in their personal lives, at least, people should be able to do what they want. The liberalization of laws relating to booze, pot, and gambling would appear proof of that. Yet at the same time — and under the guise of public health — we’ve become ever less tolerant of people making decisions about other matters, particularly tobacco and food.

Westminster’s public health department recites a familiar litany of ills about tobacco, including the diseases it causes and the addictiveness of nicotine. Because the stuff is bad for you, it concludes, it has to be banned. I suspect that many public health officials around the country, far from thinking this foolish, are nodding their heads in excited agreement — in the same way they got excited about New York City’s attempted ban on sugary drinks.

Of course, Westminster’s concerns about tobacco and nicotine apply equally to all of the other vices we now seem willing to tolerate. Liquor has enormous individual health effects and societal impacts (more than 10,000 people are killed annually by drunk drivers). Joints (most of them smoked without filters) deliver the same contaminants to your lungs as tobacco — 33 of them are cancer-causing, according to the American Lung Association. Gambling is as addictive as nicotine for some and pushes up rates of crime, suicides, bankruptcy, and domestic violence. Using Westminster’s logic, why not ban them all?

The answer, simply, is that in a free society, adults have the right to make decisions about themselves — even bad decisions. That’s the nature of liberty. We can arm people with information — sugar causes obesity, tobacco kills, and pot hurts developing brains. We can limit their effects on other people — banning smoking in bars and restaurants, funding gambling addiction programs, and cracking down on drunk drivers. But there is a clear line between those measures and dictating how people live their lives. Westminster’s paternalism may be well-meaning, but it crosses that line. Its proposal deserves to be trashed.

This column was first published in The Boston Globe on November 3, 2014.