Wednesday, June 10

Nanny state cometh

Politico:
President Barack Obama eats his vegetables and exercises every day — and he really wants you to do the same.

[..] The president is filling top posts at Health and Human Services with officials who, in their previous jobs, outlawed trans fats, banned public smoking or required restaurants to provide a calorie count with that slice of banana cream pie.

Even Congress is getting into the act, giving serious consideration to taxing sugary drinks and alcohol to help pay for the overhaul.

[..] The whole situation has libertarians craving a basket of onion rings and a beer.

“If you care about the sorts of things I do, then you are going to be losing big-time for the next four to eight years,” said David Harsanyi, a Denver Post columnist and author of the book “Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America Into a Nation of Children.”

Don’t get them wrong, critics such as Harsanyi say — they like broccoli and they lift barbells and they have no particular beef with a healthy president who was once described by his physician as having “no excess body fat.” They just don’t like it when government becomes the messenger and the enforcer.

The appointment last month of New York Public Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden as director of the CDC really made the libertarian-minded nervous.

Frieden is a big part of the reason New Yorkers no longer smoke in bars or eat trans fats at restaurants and find calorie counts on their menus. Frieden once said that when anyone in New York dies at an early age from a preventable disease, “it’s my fault.”

[..] libertarians like Michael D. Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, aren’t looking forward to it.

“At the very least,” said Tanner, “we are going to get nagged a lot.”

1 comment:

  1. The desire to be treated like an adult, i.e., not nagged is a fair one. However, I think the libertarian position underplays the role that government can have in shaping habits. People's preferences and habits will be determined by something, and to me it does not seem obviously better to throw in the towel in hopes of not being a nag and let things like the mass media, corporations and primordial preferences have a greater say in determining people's health habits than a government attempting to act in peoples' best interests.

    We human are malleable creatures who have a proven capacity to adapt to new habits (such as eating healthy) in such a fashion that the new habit no longer is felt to be a burden (you can learn to like anything if you eat it for 14 days). And you can't miss the trans fats if they never make it on the shelf (though you might pay an extra few cents for your microwave dinner because production costs are higher. Is that a terrible investment, though?)

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