It's an epidemic, like BDS but more so.

An economist once dubbed “champion of choice” by The Guardian newspaper would like your employer to organise an exercise hour for you and your colleagues. Professor Julian Le Grand was once a social policy adviser who had the ear of Tony Blair. . .

An unsympathetic reading of all this is that a respected policy wonk has lost the plot. But the professor’s prescriptions – and the libertarian paternalist philosophy behind them – make more sense than you might think. He is not crazy. He is just wrong.

Behind all three schemes lies the same idea: to influence behaviour without restricting choice. If you want salty food, you can add salt. If you do not want to do jumping jacks with your colleagues, just sign the excuse note. If you want to buy cigarettes, no problem – just sign up for the smoker’s permit. The £200 fee and the doctor’s signature, admittedly, take that particular proposal rather a long way from libertarianism. But the heart of the idea is the permit, not the fee or the doctor’s note. It could be free to any adult.

In each case, the state hopes to guide our choice, hence “paternalism”. In each case, the final decision is our own, hence “libertarian”.

There's no true choice here since the cost of the bureaucracy and the dead weight on society have no opt out. The overweening state is unaffected by your pseudo-choices.

Democracy isn't just majoritarianism. That a majority, even a large majority, want a state like this does not justify it. It's sick, a perversion of democracy, and should be named and shamed for what it is. Just as a super- majority of some Islamic country may support rule by Mullah and the resultant inhumanity, those inhumanities should still be denounced.

Libertarian paternalism makes some sense because we make different decisions in the short term than in the long term. . . In one psychological experiment, participants were offered a choice of different films, some with cultural pretensions and others with mass appeal. Whether the subjects chose something highbrow, such as Three Colours: Blue, or something lowbrow, like Mrs Doubtfire,depended on whether the film was to be watched immediately or in a couple of weeks. (Having chosen to watch Three Colours: Blue in a fortnight’s time, the subjects reversed their choice if offered Mrs Doubtfire at the last minute.)

Nonsense. The choice is between indoctrination and entertainment, not highbrow and lowbrow. That people have been browbeaten to make them ashamed of entertainment is a symptom of cultural imperialism - and so is this so-called libertarian paternalism. It's Victorian, quasi-religious oppression, and that's shameful.

The libertarian paternalism programme can boast some real achievements. Studies have shown that making people opt out of contributing to a company pension rather than opt in almost doubles the enrolment rate. More important, it seems to motivate people to make exactly the contributions they always wanted to make, but more quickly.

But it is not usually so easy to identify what people really want, nor guide them to it so unobtrusively. That means that libertarian paternalism is a licence for the government to second-guess my desires and to employ a new army of persuaders and regulators to change my behaviour to something more acceptable.

If a new softer paternalism makes the government’s influence harder to spot, that is hardly an unmixed blessing. Ed Glaeser, a Harvard-based economist, is right to point out that it is not only smokers, film buffs and couch potatoes who make mistakes. Civil servants and politicians do, too. Just because we are sometimes foolish does not mean that the government is any wiser.

Perhaps these objections are churlish. The British government has already banned smoking in private clubs populated only by consenting adults. It is also confused over the difference between global warming, which is the result of a collective- action problem, and obesity, which is not. The choice is not, it seems, between freedom and libertarian paternalism. It is between libertarian paternalism and the Supernanny state.

So I suppose you can sign me up for the libertarian paternalism programme as the lesser of two evils. What’s that? I’m already signed up, by default? That figures.

The confusion is worse than stated. All the pension example shows is that the old system was poorly designed, like a computer application whose interface was user hostile. The way to correct the inevitable mistakes of interface designers is to conduct user trials on prototypes, observe users blundering around, and discuss the experience with them afterward. Let the users, in effect, design the interface since the designers are not all-wise.

Similarly, global warming is not the result of collective-action, and is not a collective-action problem. No collective decided to alter the climate, and no collective can decide to stop doing so. It's a technological problem, not a political problem.

The UK is a mess and rapidly getting worse. It's not in such dire straits as in the pre-Thatcher days, but seems determined to become so. The disease is related to the one discussed in the previous post - a confusion of the rhetoric of concern with true concern. There's nothing liberal about paternalism, libertarian or not.