Say Anything Blog

A breakthrough because the government manipulating our diets through taxation might make us healthier, says Nicholas Kristof.

When the human body was evolving, almost the only things we drank were breast milk for the first few years and then water, water and more water.

It would obviously have been bad if we had evolved to feel full when water was sloshing about our stomachs because then we wouldn’t have eaten our fill the next time we speared a mastodon. Today, the unfortunate result is that if you drink a bottle of 7-Up, you still don’t feel full — the body treats the liquid as empty calories, like water — and so you won’t eat any less the next time you spear a Big Mac.

That has presented a huge problem in an age of sugary drinks, and some scholars believe they have become a major source of obesity. That’s why the new soda tax proposed by Gov. David Paterson of New York is such a breakthrough.

Mr. Paterson suggested the tax — an 18 percent sales tax on soft drinks and other nondiet sugary beverages — to help raise $400 million a year to plug a hole in the state budget. But it’s also a landmark effort that, if other states follow, could help make us healthier.

Would taxes on unhealthy foods and drinks such as fast food and soda make us healthier?  Maybe, but I’d point out that prohibition didn’t exactly stop alcohol consumption.  And that the war on drugs has hardly made a dent in the availability or expense of illegal narcotics.  Yet these lessons from our history, and in the case of the war on drugs our present, just don’t seem to be learned by the nanny staters.

But, to be perfectly honest, that’s not even the most important point against the government trying to regulate our diets through taxation.  The most important point is: Since when did we stop being a free country?  When did what we eat and drink become the business of the government?

I’ll not argue against the idea that the foods the proponents of this sort of policy are, in fact, unhealthy (though I will accuse them of routinely exaggerating the scope and severity of the “obesity crisis”) but I will say that every citizen of this country should be free to be as unhealthy as they want to be.

Because what is the alternative?  The nanny staters won’t ever get sweeping bans of things like soda or fast food passed (they learned at least that much from the failure of prohibition), but they can take our freedoms away one little chunk at a time.  Already smoking is banned pretty much everywhere except at home under a bed behind a locked door with the lights out.  Now they’re working on taxing soda and fast food, not to mention shutting down bars that cater to cigar smokers.  What’s on the agenda next?  A tax on salt usage?  A tax on twinkies (Kristof said he’d like one in the column quoted above)?

And once all those complicated taxes are in place, why not just have the government issue a menu of food and beverages that are approved for consumption?  You know, to make life a little easier?

Sound absurd?  Well so did a taxes on soda consumption and government-mandated doctors visits a generation or so ago, yet here we are today discussing those very policies seriously.

To be blunt, I don’t want to live in an America where the government sees a cold Coca-Cola on a hot summer day as something to be taxed and regulated.