Comment by preg_match

Ideally yes, and as another commenter pointed out they do. Moreover, they can’t lie and say alcohol is good for you. In fact they can’t say much at all, their advertising avenues are very limited. It’s even worse for tobacco.

They got in this mess not because they made bad products that kill people. That’s actually fine, no politician in the US cares about that. No, they got into this mess because they spend decades covering up the truth and trying to convince consumers “see, it’s not that bad!”

Now that’s a problem. If the product just killed people we could sit around and play the “free will” game. “Well you see consumers can choose to kill themselves!” But that game goes out the window when we pollute free will with deception.

What free will actually looks like is a price that reflects the actual cost of the product, as well as labels that make it clear “this will kill you”. Turns out, when we do that, a lot less people choose to consume the product.