Why does it have to? Coke as a company is responsible for some horrifying effects on the world. Health effects, economic depression in the developing world, ongoing environmental harm. And for what? Sugar water. Not space travel, not energy, not transportation, not safer aircraft or cars, not saving lives, no. For fucking. Sugar. Water.
And they're far from the only company burning energy, effort, time and knowledge to accomplish nothing but profits at the expense of virtually everything else touching them.
The parent comment said that externalities should be priced in, I am saying it's not an externality and is already "priced in" if it hurts only the drinker. That's orthogonal to Coke being good or bad.
The externalites aren't priced in though. Heavy consumers of soft drinks require more health care on average which affects insurance prices of non-drinkers. To be truly "fair" this should be factored into the price of such products so that buying a coke includes an x dollar tax for your estimated increase in medical needs. This is however only doable with a socialized medical system.
The other option is to let insurance companies monitor your diet, but that sounds quite a bit more dystopic...
This view is too myopic. In India, for example, Coke sucks millions of litres of fresh water when surrounding areas are suffering from drought or mostly barren. There has been cases where Coke was forced to move out of a location due to outrage from people ... Personally, I'm of the view that individuals should be responsible in their decisions and how banning advertising of toxic products or the product itself will lead to a better society ...
Coke is enjoyable to many, that's a benefit. Air travel and space travel also cause ongoing environmental harm, whose says the benefits of those outweigh the environmental cost?
Maybe we should ban them as well. All companies "burn" energy, effort, and time to produce profits, that's pretty much the goal of a company.
True. But would people enjoy it as much if it were priced accordingly to give the workers who made it a living wage? If they had to pay full non-subsidized prices for the corn sugar they use, and to give those workers a living wage as well? In other words, would people enjoy it as much if it was instead of a dollar a bottle, more like four dollars?
And don't even try and shift to a different company. It is not unreasonable to assume that there is ethical compromise involved in purchasing anything from a company Coke's size. Chiquita almost started a war so they could continue exploiting South Americans for cheap bananas.
I take issue with this "well there's no haaaarm" point because there very often IS harm. There is tons of harm if you follow the supply lines back to the developing world where western corporations exploit entire nations for the sake of cheap goods that then are consumed at a break neck pace in the West, far more than they should be, which then even harms THOSE people by making them overweight.
If your company could do actual good in the world by ceasing to exist, then I question why you need to exist in the first place. That's all I'm saying.
I would bet excess sugar (and carbohydrate) consumption is the second largest externality via taxpayer spending on people’s healthcare due to obesity and diabetes. The biggest externality is destabilization of the environment from pollution.
That's only a problem if healthcare is taxpayer-funded. Otherwise it's your and your insurer's problem to price this in somehow, maybe even offering cheaper plans for people living healthy (e.g. meeting weight goals).
The whole idea behind insurance is that the unlucky ones who require more care than average have their costs covered by those who require less than average. Taxpayer funding systems are literally the same thing.
Yes you can get cheaper premiums by living healthy, but how far do you want to go? Are you going to let your insurance company log everything you eat and how many steps you walk every day? Seems much easier to just factor in the external cost of goods into their price.
The whole idea of insurance is amortization of rare costly events over large numbers of people. Ideally, each person's insurance cost is equal to the expected value of the payout.
When I got my driver's license at age 17 (or possibly the learner's permit? I forget), we learned that the car insurance company would reduce the premium for me if we regularly submitted them some kind of proof that I was getting good grades. It's possible this was some kind of "public-service program to encourage desired behavior", but I suspect that at least part of why they did it was because straight-A students are less likely to get into accidents.
For medical insurance, it seems they could at least do something like "if you send us evidence of healthy exercise/diet/weight, then we'll lower your premiums; otherwise you'll get a premium based on the estimated risk of the set of people who don't do this". (If the government doesn't forbid it. healthcare.gov says "They also can’t take your current health or medical history into account", which sounds like it might rule out some of that.)
2. It was probably also both a community service project AND a reflection of lower expected insurance payout.
3. Maybe the straight-A students are correlated with insurance payers that would rather pay the repair known 1-off payment (or skip doing anything at all) vs the unknown recurring increase in insurance payments?
(Source: drove a dented-up pickup for over a year after a short romp along/into an orchard)
1. What would a tax deduction have to do with an insurer charging lower premiums to its customer?
2. The lower expected payout is exactly what an insurance company is trying to determine, and they’re very good at doing that assuming they have lots of data.
3. Most vehicle insurance cost are liability related, meaning the damage their insured to others, and namely healthcare costs. A collision with another person or their property will not be fixed without the insurance company getting involved, and a reduction in those is what the insurance company is betting on.
