Illustration shows a lady eating a
hamburger and a police officer shining a flashligh in her
face.
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The Minister of Fat -- pardon me, the Minister of Health -- Anne
McLellan is jumping on the obesity bandwagon. Good exercise for her!
"We are a nation," she said "or becoming a nation, of obese people."
According to Statistics Canada, 46% of Canadians are overweight or
obese. Does Ms. McLellan draw the democratic conclusion that more
fat politicians should be elected, and fatter bureaucrats hired? No,
she wants to social-engineer the people into the land of the thin
and the obedient.
Follow the guide, i.e., the American guide. The U.S. Surgeon
General recently argued that nearly as many people die from
overweight and obesity as from smoking. Obesity, like smoking, is
described as an "epidemic." Some 36% of Americans are overweight;
another 23% are classified as obese. There is no official public
health label covering both the overweight and the obese, so we might
call them "the fat," or perhaps the "non-PC fat." The new American
jihad is again being imitated by governments all over the world,
which means assaults on what the Surgeon General calls "unhealthy
dietary habits and sedentary behaviour."
The Quebec Department of Health will address obesity in its
planned "national" program of public health. The ideas being
circulated include subsidizing food deemed healthy by politicians
and bureaucrats, taxes on junk food, and restrictions on
advertising. "We must be as aggressive towards bad nutrition as we
have been towards cigarette smoking," declares a Laval University
professor. Another specialist notes that "we need to do more than
just educating people."
As in all grand social-engineering schemes, the inconsistencies
are numerous. Forcibly stimulated by the state, the drop in smoking
may have contributed to the rise in obesity. Tomas Philipson, a
professor of economics at University of Chicago, writes in the
journal Health Economics: "Anti-smoking measures may increase
obesity and by doing so reduce the health benefits of these measures
because smoking is a method of weight control ..."
But the basic question is: Why does the state want to fight
obesity? An intuitive answer is that nice politicians and
bureaucrats care about the welfare of the population. This answer
seems naive given what we know about both the history and the nature
of the state.
Historically, the state has been anything but nice to its
subjects. Has this changed with the democratic state? Let's be
serious. The actual state is not really ruled by the majority. Most
people are "rationally ignorant" of complex policy matters and, in
any event, only vote periodically for muddy programs with unknown
and unforeseeable consequences. The fat state belongs to the
political and the bureaucratic classes, and is influenced by a host
of minority, special interest groups. And even if the state were
democratic, letting a majority impose its preferred lifestyle
choices would be closer to what Alexis de Tocqueville called the
"tyranny of the majority" than to the maximization of social
welfare.
An individual's weight, what he eats, and how much he exercises,
are all lifestyle choices. Professor Philipson and economist Richard
Posner have analyzed the broad economic reasons behind the long-term
growth in people's weight. "If health is not everything in life,"
writes Mr. Philipson, "rational people may ... prefer their
high-paying sedentary jobs to more physically demanding ones that
pay less."
But let's assume that the state has changed, and that we can now
trust it to care about the public welfare. The problem is that, as
demonstrated by a whole strand of economic analysis, there is no way
to maximize welfare for everybody. The state can only promote some
individuals' interests at the expense of other individuals' welfare.
In the best case, the disadvantaged are a minority, but it is still
true that their preferences are coercively overruled for the sake of
others.
It is well documented that, contrary to smokers, the fat impose
net costs to the rest of society. A RAND economist, Roland Sturm,
shows that obesity carries more health risks and higher costs than
smoking or drinking. Policies against obesity may benefit non-obese
taxpayers, who would then have to subsidize lower medical
expenditures for the obese. However, these policies will
disadvantage those who will shoulder the burden of new regulations,
be they the people whose lifestyles become regulated, or the owners
of companies (like fast-food outlets) that cater to the fat, among
other customers. Already, in Oakland, Calif., schools, selling soft
drinks is forbidden.
The standard argument against sedentariness illustrates the
arbitrary and dangerous character of the public health approach.
Another RAND study concluded: "We estimate that lack of exercise
imposes external costs of 24 cents for every mile that sedentary
people do not walk, jog, or run." How can somebody impose a cost to
others by, say, staying quietly in front of his TV set? Answer:
Because the Welfare State has assumed part of the costs of lifestyle
choices. This would mean that anybody who costs something to the
Welfare State becomes a burden to others.
In fact, the groups most favoured by the coming jihad on fat will
probably be the public health industry, i.e., health bureaucrats,
subsidized public health specialists, and lawyers.
Now, despite their obvious interests, perhaps bureaucrats and
subsidized public health crusaders do have a genuine concern for the
people whose lifestyle choices they attack. Perhaps they sincerely
believe that the fat will be happier if they are coercively
restricted in their choices. This is called state paternalism:
knowing better what's good for your subjects, and forcing them to
behave accordingly.
One problem with state paternalism is that it requires much power
and coercion. Indeed, there is a strange correlation between state
power and interventions by the public health elite. "Food," said a
Nazi slogan, "is not a private matter." The U.S. Surgeon General is
more prudent. "Many people believe that dealing with overweight and
obesity is a personal responsibility," he writes. "To some degree
they are right, but it is also a community responsibility."
At any rate, who in his right mind would choose politicians,
bureaucrats and subsidized public health crusaders, to make
paternalistic choices for him? Perhaps some eccentric individuals
would, but this does not justify forcing in the mould those who
would not. Writes Mr. Philipson: "Just as you do not want your local
economist to perform your next surgical intervention, you do not
want the public health community to design your social
interventions."