As longer licensing hours draw closer, the binge-drink panic movement gathers vim - at the weekend, it was revealed that many pubs intend to "exploit" the binge-drink culture, by encouraging punters to drink more. Their methods are nefarious - they might "upsell" singles to doubles with such satanic whispers as "why not make that a double?" Dave Daley, head of the National Association of Licensed House Managers, muttered darkly, "How we make our money is to make people binge drink: the more people drink, the more I get as a bonus ... The difference between us and other selling operations is that we're selling a drug." This piece, in the Observer, was accompanied by a first-hand account of a journalist who was served, with a friend, "64 units by the same barmaid, no questions asked". Enough alcohol to kill; though it's worth noting that if a person was drinking those units rather than just ordering them, they would get pretty legless before they died. (My memory of being a barmaid was that you stopped serving someone once they could no longer articulate what they wanted. We weren't expected to count drinks - otherwise we wouldn't have been barmaids, we'd have been playing championship bridge.) It's true that people selling legal drugs are subject to restrictions that people selling board games aren't. Cigarette companies aren't allowed to advertise; alcohol companies have, as a gesture of goodwill, started putting "please drink responsibly" on billboards, which is a bit like showing a Land Rover coursing through a snowscape chasing a spy and saying "please cycle more" at the end. If you're flogging something actively damaging to health, you can't be too gung-ho in telling everyone what fun it is. But pubs seeking to sell more are doing what any business does: taking an existing market and trying to milk it for all it's worth. Trying to make a special exception for things that are bad for you - booze, fags, fast food - is daft. All excess consumption is, on some level - physiological, psychological, environmental, or all three - bad for everyone, except the seller. The reason we and the government try to make a special case out of health-related selling is because of the NHS, which is the ultimate victim of this aggressive marketing. Its existence is an anomaly - it functions best in the circumstances in which it was created, viz, a more frugal time when people would of course become ill but could be relied on not to try to kill themselves every weekend. It is ideologically out of step with the market principles we thank for our high living standards. If we wanted to be rational and consistent, which thank God we don't, we would can it and open up the illness game to regular forces. It's not only health we get exercised about. Similar moral objections emerge around bookselling giants, which "cynically" try to sell more books with dirty-tricks campaigns like putting a lot of bright pink ones in their windows and discontinuing the boring ones. Sure, this is what a shoe shop would do, but books are different because they are "worthy" - they have an inherent ethical weight that their manufacturers and distributors ought to respect by not behaving like manufacturers or distributors. In both instances, the revelation is the same: we aren't as comfortable with the free-market economy as we thought. We claim to have embraced, or at least accepted, it but when it comes to matters of importance, the integrity and protection of the body or mind, we return to an anachronistic model of commerce in which both sides are flush with responsibility and respect, though not with cash. So this anti-pub furore, though daft, is also endearing. We can say what we like about modernity, but we aren't as far gone as we thought.