It’s hard to pinpoint how the resurgence of liberalism came about so recently.

It could’ve have been a genuine respect for letting people behave as they want free from barriers, in keeping with the neoliberal philosophy of unfettered markets.

The right wing have tended to try to conflate law with bulky ‘red tape’, though it’s interesting reading Hayek’s views on the law straight from the horse’s mouth.

As we approach steadily the UK election to be held on June 7th 2015, the usual criticism from the Conservatives will be that Labour likes to tax and spend your money.

Ed Miliband, with the able support of Livesey and Wood, though wish to have break from this cycle.

Hopefully their attempts will be more successful than Gordon Brown’s aspiration to release himself from ‘boom and bust’.

There is an alternative to taxing foods in individual consumer choices.

A disruptive way of looking at the issue would be to admit, but not necessary accept, that multinational corporates have a huge influence on customer behaviour.

And rather than taxing the individual the different approach is to ‘nudge’ the corporate. In English law, since the seminal case of Salomon v Salomon seen in the House of Lords, the corporate has been viewed as a ‘person’.

Various crimes can be levelled, to varying levels of success, at corporates, including theft, manslaughter and fraud.

It might therefore be possible to ‘nudge  the corporate’, rather than taxing individuals.

The idea of a nudge comes from behavioural economics – a field dedicated to understanding why people and institutions make the decisions they do. It grew in the 1960s as scientific knowledge about the brain played a bigger role in psychology but it bubbled over with the publication of ‘Nudge’.

An American economist called Richard Thaler (already a don in behavioural economics) teamed up with Cass Sunstein, a legal scholar, to explain “choice architecture” – and, to defend its use. They argue that by presenting choices better, people make wiser decisions without losing their freedom of choice.

The last Labour administration was viewed by many as excessively authoritarian, e.g. the debacle over detention without trial. Since overplaying its hand, Labour has had moral difficulty in trying to persuade the public for the rôle of state intervention, though it has had some recent theoretical success over fixing colluded energy prices in oligopoly energy markets.

Thaler and Sunstein cite the example of a school cafeteria.

If the healthier food is placed at eye level and is easier to reach than the junk food, individuals’ behaviour might be altered – they might pick the fruit and veg even though they are still free to pick the chips.

‘Big’ has a lot of influence in the UK grocery markets.

Tesco control 30% of the UK grocery market, and have over 2,000 stores in the UK. In 2010 they made a profit of £3.4bn, yet they manage their corporate tax affairs successfully.

‘Fat taxes’ have taken various incarnations over the years, and the statistics cited seem plausible.

For example, a 20% tax on sugary drinks might possibly reduce the number of obese adults in the UK by 180,000.

The impact would be greatest in the under-30s, according to an Oxford and Reading university study.

But some groups say a tax is misguided and simplistic, and would not have an impact on older age groups who might benefit most from losing weight.

Doctors have called for a soft drinks tax to reduce sugar intake. Sugar-sweetened drinks, when taken regularly, have been shown to increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and tooth decay.

In thinking how to influence behaviour, it might be quite sensible to target efforts on the largest retailers here in the UK.

A report published in April 2011 – Right to Retail: Can Localism Save Britain’s Small Retailers? – argues that government must do more to rebalance the retail economy away from the “big four” supermarkets, which control nearly 80% of the country’s £150bn grocery market.

“Britain every year is less and less a nation of shopkeepers – assets and ownership are concentrating, finance has become the preserve of the City of London and high streets have converged as though by centralised design. The UK’s 8,151 supermarket outlets today account for 97% of total grocery sales, and 76% of groceries are sold by just the four biggest retailers,” the report said.

Rather than finding ways of taxing indirectly individual customers, a more sensible way might be way of finding incentives to encourage large corporates to behave a certain way on behalf of the end customer.

Corporates clearly care about tax.

Starbucks is to move its European head office from Amsterdam to London by the end of the year, following a row over corporate tax avoidance. The relocation will concentrate a “modest number of senior executives” in its London operation. The US coffee giant said its leaders would “better oversee the UK market” from the capital, adding that the UK was its largest European market. Last year, Starbucks paid £5m in corporation tax, its first such tax payment since 2009.

But tax is an explosive issue. Tax is seen as regressive and unfair as it lays the greatest burden on the least well off. Discriminatory taxation has thus far been ineffective in producing public health goals. Tax furthermore is unlikely to increase significantly government revenues.

But there are ways of rigging the tax system to encourage certain behaviours. And it might cause a redistribution of resources, judged as ‘fair’, to fulfil a genuine policy goal.

Supermarkets collect meticulous about their transactions anyway. The original criticism of ‘activity based costing’ (1992) cited in the discussion of the original papers of Cooper and Kaplan, which transpose to the criticism of ‘payment by results’, is that the amount of effort to collect data does not justify its subsequent analysis.

But supermarkets will know exactly how many bottles of full-sugar Coca they have sold. These data are easy to collect, in the same way that an individual has to collect meticulously information about his income tax claim.

A single fibre of asbestos can cause an aggressive cancer of the lung lining called mesothelioma. We all know the lengths which have been taken to ‘suppress’ the information about risks of tobacco for lung cancer. We have been witnessing a similar battle over sugar and obesity.

Unlike a single fibre of asbestos causing mesothelioma, knowing how much a certain lifestyle contributes to morbidity can be difficult. But that’s not to say there is no link. While intuitively people have railed against consumption taxes, or ear-marked taxation, the idea of guess-timating the amount of resources to treat people in the NHS from consumer decisions that they have made elsewhere is not totally ridiculous.

For example, greater obesity might lead to a greater prevalence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and cirrhosis.

Greater consumption of alcohol might lead to a greater prevalence of cirrhosis.

We already have a scheme which raises money for the NHS from business in the Road Traffic (NHS Charges) Act 1999. Each time there is an accident, a motor insurer is legally obliged to inform the NHS, which will determine if it is liable for any costs. The scheme is administered by the Compensation Recovery Unit.  In 2001 the scheme was raising £100 million a year for the NHS.

You may have to pay Capital Gains Tax if you make a profit or gain when you dispose of all or part a business asset. Disposing of an asset might be selling it, giving it away or exchanging it. ‘Entrepreneurial relief’ is available for you as an individual if you are in business, for example as a sole trader or as a partner in a trading business, or hold shares in your personal trading company.

So an adjustment could be made for tax calculations for supermarket chains, and supermarkets will sell a lot of ‘healthy food’ could be given an appropriate tax relief.

But nudges don’t always work – especially when private companies have an interest in making sure consumer behaviour does not change.

Some claim that nudges can infantilise individuals by taking away their moral maturity. Others have also questioned their desirability, stating there is a fine line between persuasion and coercion.

And who’s to know what is healthy today suddenly doesn’t become unhealthy tomorrow. The relief rates for any tax adjustments could only be made according to evidence at any one time, and this evidence can and does change.

But the outcome of the discussion is not important as such. I’m more interested in how you might be able to ‘nudge the corporate’, increasingly with a lot of social and economic power, if there is a widespread unwillingness to tax an individual for his or her own choices.

Corporates might want to prove their sustainability credentials for all I know. But if the general public are still hugely fond of full sugar Coca Cola, corporates might be willing to sell it despite less tax relief. Market forces and all that.