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.