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Ah, right you're talking about the specific practical implementation of these things. My bad. I don't have a better model than the current one kicking about, that's for sure. The ideal of the current model in my country (the UK) is that the scientific community figures out what things are unambiguously helpful and unambiguously harmful and legislation is enacted to maximise and minimise those activities. More ambiguous things don't tend to get legislation enacted. That the actual implementation of the model falls short in a number of ways is obvious and unfortunate, but I don't know enough about the subject to propose a better solution. If you have one I would be interested to hear it.
For it not to cause problems people would have to be fine with an outside force making a large number of their decisions for them. It appears to be an inherent human trait to dislike excess meddling by any outside force so I'm not entirely sure that such a population exists. This may simply reflect a western view of looking at things though, my knowledge of the mindset of Chinese people for example is obviously insufficient.
I would still have one issue with it even if people didn't mind being meddled with. Hard paternalism implies bans on things, hard rules that are not allowed to be broken. There are almost always situations where the reasons behind a rule do not apply. With hard paternalism a person would be prohibited from doing something even when it made sense in that specific situation.
You've been blunt with me so I'll do you the same courtesy. People are bad at judging what actions maximise their own best interest. I believe that a majority of people are highly effected by the environment in which they make their decisions and can be induced to make different decisions, good or bad, through clever manipulation. Most people do not have the knowledge to deal with manipulation like this in an effective manner. It is an asymmetrical fight, because advertisers can apply whole departments of people and the latest knowledge of neuroscience to manipulating the inherent biases of the human brain while normal people devote very little or no time to countermeasures. As the knowledge and money base of advertising increases I would expect people to be more and more swayed.
I will give some specific examples and predictions to bring this back to earth. If healthy food was cheaper and as easy to prepare as unhealthy food, a country would have a healthier populace of a lower weight and live longer. If soft drinks high in fructose and other simple sugars were advertised less, diabetes rates would drop. Some examples of things known to work: When cigarettes were made expensive and the health effects well known such that people who decided to smoke were regarded as silly, cigarette use decreased so did lung cancer (after an appropriate time lag). If pension payments are made automatic as part of a pay cheque and employees simply have to check a box to opt out, employee pensions savings increase.
The idea of soft paternalism is to discourage bad decisions while still allowing them to be made. It is to make the right thing to do, the easy thing to do. The barriers against bad decisions are intentionally low such that anyone with a good reason can circumvent them. This allows policy makers to improve people's lives en mass without actually curtailing any specific person's autonomy very much. This has the useful side effect that if a bad decision is made by the government people can route around it with comparative ease.
By the way, that pattern of highly valuing autonomy and intense suspicion of government intrusion is something I find extremely common in US Americans, but is comparatively rare in my country the UK. I would be interested to talk to you about possible causes if you're up for it. My immediate thought is that the US government has given people more reasons to distrust it but I would much rather know your thinking, seeing as you live there.
"Intentionally low" barriers have this way of expanding when the people who put the barriers in place either find they don't work to keep people away, or stand to benefit from making the barrier stronger.
Also, you're still forcing your decision on people who are poor enough that they can't afford to get across the barrier easily. (Whether that happens, of course, depends on the exact barrier used.)