Welcome, I'm Anastasia Glova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

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Recent studies in the burgeoning field of behavioral economics show that people

consistently fail to make choices that they know are good for them.

For example, everyone knows that it's probably bad to eat the twinkie and probably good to start saving for retirement.

We just have trouble doing what we know is good for us because we don't like to deter gratification.

Is Libertarian paternalism the answer or is it just another name for a growing nanny state?

Cato Policy analyst Will Wilkinson has some interesting answers.

Is Libertarian paternalism a contradiction?

Let me tell you what Libertarian paternalism is supposed to be in the 2003 American Economic Review,

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein published a paper by that name, Libertarian Paternalism.

And the idea that they had was that there are some paternalistic policies that don't

require any coercion.

What they had in mind were things like

you're a restaurant owner and you realize

that people will eat too many desserts

if the dessert card is right by the tables so you move the dessert

cart to the back end of the restaurant and that will prevent people from eating too much dessert.

And they call that libertarian paternalism but it's just a confusing

use of the words there's nothing paternalistic about creating the boundaries of

choices in a way that doesn't interfere with people's autonomy.

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