Say Anything Blog

Andrew Ferguson points out that obesity is going to be the next front in the battle between the government busy-bodies and those of us who just want to be free:

On December 15, the city council of Binghamton, New York—every member a proud progressive—unanimously passed an ordinance making it a crime to discriminate against fat people. The next day, David Paterson, the famously progressive governor of New York, proposed a special “fat tax” on soda pop because soda pop makes people fat.
When it comes to obesity, the authorities in New York have put their citizens on notice: We will get you coming and going.

Supporters make clear that each move is only preliminary to even greater reforms. Several legislators are interested in a statewide “weight-based” discrimination law, and fat taxes on other foods may prove irresistible.

Obesity is very today, very right now. Obesity is the new smoking. “What smoking was to my parents’ generation,” Paterson says, “obesity is to my children’s generation.” He means this in two ways. One is that kids today—these kids today!—eat fatty foods with as much ardor as their grandparents smoked tobacco. The other is that government intends to eradicate the first vice with the same ruthlessness as it did the second. And it’s not an idle threat. The campaign against smoking was progressivism’s greatest recent success. Over a span of 20 years, an ancient human weakness once enjoyed by nearly half the population and quietly tolerated by the other half became virtually outlawed.

The anti-smoking campaign shows how to turn a private vice requiring tolerance and indulgence into a public offense demanding regulation and official censure.

What I don’t understand is why we’ve lost sight of this simple fact: America is a free country.  If we want to live in an unhealthy fashion, why is that the government’s business?

With smoking the nanny staters were able to win their battles with hysterical nonsense about second hand smoke (if second hand smoke is so damaging where’s the holocaust of respiratory illness from all the kids who grew up in homes where their parents smoked in the 1950’s - 1970’s?), but how are they going to make that argument with being fat?  After all, there is no second-hand impact on the health of others when you eat a cheeseburger or down a milkshake.

I think the argument they’re going to make is about public dollars spent on treating obese people.  They’re going to say that Americans being fat is costing too many tax dollars, so that justifies the government exercising regulatory control over our diets.  But isn’t that an argument against policies that make the general public responsible, fiscally, for the health decisions of individuals?  Maybe instead of using tax dollars spent on health care as an excuse to regulate our freedom to eat and drink what we want we should shift back to individual responsibility.

Meaning that you are free to be as fat as you want to be, but the consequences of that chubby existence are all yours and nobody else’s.  Wouldn’t that make more sense?

It might, if we were still a country that valued things like individual responsibility.  But we’re not anymore, I think.  We all want to be bailed out from our own bad decisions, and that desire is going to sell our freedom down the river one onion ring and cigarette at a time.