Want another reason to tax advertising?
In a remarkable indictment of contemporary capitalism and the “addiction economy” as drivers of America’s moral drift, Utah Governor Spencer Cox and Harvard Public Culture Project director Ian Marcus Corbin invoke Christopher Lasch’s 1979 critique of The Culture of Narcissism:
In a 2023 Harvard study, 58 percent of young adults reported lacking meaning and purpose in their lives. Without a moral or spiritual orientation, shared values and projects that can give shape to a life, and knit a community together, start to seem inaccessible, relics of a bygone past. Such conditions lead to toxic politics and a turn to harmful substances and behaviors that grant a small hit of dopamine, or some thin imitation of belonging, but render us only more powerless and lonely.
Too much of American economic life is designed to amplify and profit from these addiction spirals. As historian Christopher Lasch put it in the 1970s:
“In a simpler time, advertising merely called attention to the product and extolled its advantages. Now it manufactures a product of its own: the consumer, perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored. Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life.”
It’s one thing to buy well-made shoes because they protect your feet and look attractive. It’s another to buy yet one more pair of shoes because advertisers have convinced you that your present life is shabby but this next purchase will finally make you happy.
The online attention economy, especially social media, has intensified the reality Lasch described. Practically every aspect, down to the shade of red that alerts you to a new comment or like, has been calibrated not to make you wiser or happier but to get you hooked. Other examples of the addiction economy include the destructive rise of buy-now-pay-later financing, mobile sports betting, online pornography and vaping [Spencer Cox and Ian Marcus Corbin, “The Consequences of America’s Moral Drift,” Washington Post, 2025.10.26].
Advertising isn’t free speech. Modern advertising peddles addiction as surely as the makers of alcohol and nicotine do. We should tax advertising accordingly to start paying for its externalities.
Data have revealed that the consumption of sugary drinks results in some 184,000 deaths worldwide each year.
How Coca Cola, Archer Daniels Midland, and News Corpse have fattened themselves and us on sugar water is patently offensive and criminal. Drilling for the petroleum to make containers that end up in landfills is malicious and hateful especially when exposure to plastic can cause hormone changes that can lead to gender dysphoria.
Mike Sanborn is responsible for some of the most sexist and misogynistic Deadwood and Sturgis Rally billboards littering I-90 and advertising is a gateway drug so it should be subject to increased taxation, too.
“Advertising isn’t free speech.”
Um, actually it is. Edenfield v. Fane.
perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored.
Did Bob Seger steal this for his hit song “Night Moves?”
I’d rather have Hamms beer ads again rather than Charlie Kirk giving racist, sexist. Homophobic meaning to young mens lives. We don’t need moral or spiritual guidance from lying aholes. Prove me wrong.
While I’m in agreement with your overall concern, how is advertising not free speech?
George U gives us a drive-by citation and no analysis. A quick reading of the case cited shows that the Supreme did not blanket-declare advertising to be free speech, did not forbid all state regulation of commercial speech, and did not mention anything about taxation, which is the remedy I recommend for addressing the externalities of modern manipulative advertising.
In Edenfield v. Fane (1993), the relatively sane and independent Supreme Court of 32 years ago ruled that the Florida Board of Accountancy violated Scott Fane’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights when it banned CPAs like him from engaging in “direct, in-person, uninvited solicitation” to win new clients. The case was predicated on the assumption that “Fane seeks to communicate no more than truthful, nondeceptive information proposing a lawful commercial transaction” [p. 765]. The online advertising and the overall addiction economy that Cox and Corbin decry is deceptive, manipulative, and destructive. The Fane Court might not extend the same protection to nefarious online manipulation that it did to Fane’s pitches to clients.
The Fane ruling focuses on “solicitation”, “direct and spontaneous communication between buyer and seller” [p. 766]. That’s not advertising, certainly not the sort of taxable business transaction in which a third party mediates between seller and potential customers by producing pop-up web ads, billboards, radio spots, etc.
The court said the state could regulate/proscribe CPA solicitation if demonstrate that “the State’s interests in proscribing it are substantial, … the challenged regulation advances these interests in a direct and material way, and … the extent of the restriction on protected speech is in reasonable proportion to the interests served” [p. 767]. The court found that the state asserted substantial interests—”protecting consumers from fraud or overreaching by CPAs” and “maintain[ing] both the fact and appearance of CPA independence in auditing a business and attesting to its financial statements” [p. 768]—but failed to demonstrate that its solicitation ban
advanced those interests.
While rejecting Florida’s ban, the Fane court noted that it was fine with bans in 25 other states and D.C. that forbade CPA solicitations that were “fraudulent, deceptive, or coercive” [p. 768]. The court extends its analysis to say that states may ban even honest solicitations that invade privacy, being “pressed with such frequency or vehemence as to intimidate, vex, or harass the recipient” [p. 769]. Those concepts of coercion and privacy relate vitally to Cox and Corbin’s concern that the online attention economy isn’t working to make us wiser or happier but to get us hooked, via constant surveillance and manipulation.
The Fane decision did not overturn Ohralik v. Ohio State Bar Assn (1978), in which the Supreme Court upheld restrictions on in-person solicitation by lawyers like Ohralik, who visited an 18-year-old accident victim in her hospital room to try to get her to hire him as her lawyer. The court distinguished Fane’s protected speech from Ohralik’s proscribable speech:
In Fane and Ohralik, the court placed the burden of proof on the regulators. But if they want to restrict the misleading, manipulative, and harmful ad machines of the online addiction economy, Cox and Corbin could point to the language of the Fane decision to justify regulation of online ads that use AI-powered surveillance and algorithms to target online shoppers at moments of high stress and vulnerability. They could make an argument that the state has a substantial interest in protecting consumer privacy and well-being from online manipulators seeking to profit from making the citizenry “perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored.”
So, thank you, George U, for citing Edenfield v. Fane. That case helps us understand that advertising is not entitled to blanket protection under the First Amendment. As always, the state has to make a strong case for restricting free speech, and the state failed to do so in Fane, but states have successfully made such a case in many other situations.
Young people don’t know what “meaning and purpose” are, yet. 58% being confused seems about right.
Teach your children how advertising is trying to trick them. That’ll be a bigger benefit for them than having them “helicopter parented” into not seeing ads and growing up naive.