http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24bittman.html
Just a link to an article written on taxing fattening foods. Some of my favorite comments:
Excellent article. I would support any politician of any party who ran with these ideas. This is not about the nanny state taking away people's rights (by the way, when we talk about rights, why do so few remember to mention responsibilities?) It seems to me that people who develop illnesses or injuries from risky lifestyle choices, are free riders on our health care system. It is statistically possible to calculate dollar amounts spent on health care for illnesses and injuries that result from voluntary life choices that come with serious health risks attached. The retail prices of those items should include assessments, which go directly into a fund to pay for the health care that is going to result from them. That's not restricting anyone's right to anything, but it is asking people to be responsible enough to pay their own way. [I have a responsibility to my society to manage my body in a way that society approves of?]
I love this idea! Why should only the affluent get to eat fresh fruit and vegetables, while the poor get more and more unhealthy? Plus, this would help pay the health costs that are caused by such an unhealthy diet. Those corporations who produce and profit from these products will complain, which, as wealthy and healthy individuals, they can't see any problem from their viewpoint; after all, they mostly know other wealthy and healthy people and couldn't imagine a breakfast of cola and chips. Talk to the poor, and they want to eat healthy, but simply can't afford it. There is either no healthy option nearby, or it's a choice between eating something and rent/transportation/health care. If Michelle Obama wishes to battle childhood obesity with her, "Let's Move" campaign, how about using this idea to fix up the choice of fuel for their bodies? [Poor people can afford vegetables and fruit, although it is a difference of degree to be sure.]
Mr. Bittman’s concise, and well thought out arguments are yet another blow to the notion that free markets can do no wrong. Adherence to this ideology, which was revived after the Great Depression by Milton Friedman and irrevocably instilled into our political culture by Ronald Reagan, has crippled our government for at least the past 30 years. As Mr. Bittman simply illustrates, the free market has created a environment in which the pursuit of maximum profit for a limited number of individuals in the short run (through the production and marketing of cheap yet incredibly unhealthy food) saddles our nation as a whole with hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs in the long run. And as we are all currently witnessing, our country simply cannot afford to continue to spend a continually-increasing percentage of our GDP on health care costs. [Ignoring government interference in the food market and ignoring the fact that health care costs managed by the government is not free market]
I like this idea. Clearly, given the current system of incentives, we as a culture lack the ability to make healthier lifestyle choices. Yet we somehow expect someone else to foot the bill for our resulting disease. If we are fine with offloading a significant portion of the responsibility for our healthcare costs to the public at large, the public at large should have a say in the incentives underlying what drives those costs - and junk food stands at the top of the list. We're already doling out incentives. Unfortunately we're funneling them in a direction that's killing us. We shouldn't have to settle for that. [Here's a better idea: Don't offload your portion of your health care cost to the public at-large and maybe it won't cost so much and people won't make awful decisions.]
I'm sure that there will be howls of protest from so-called freedom lovers but we have for decades subsidized agri-business with nary a peep from most Americans. [So-called? Approving of choice in food consumption is pro-freedom. There is nothing "so-called" about that.]
A brilliant idea that, unfortunately, would probably never fly. Considering how the Tea Party reactionaries got themselves into a froth over the ban on wasteful light bulbs, they'd probably become even more apoplectic about a junk food tax. Look at how they laid into poor Michelle Obama when she promoted healthy eating as a way to curb childhood obesity. A soda tax was recently proposed in Philadelphia and the beverage industry spent a fortune to defeat it with deceptive ads about "the government telling us what to eat." One could expect a much more vociferous reaction if a national junk food tax was proposed. [So would a national junk food tax not amount to "the government telling us what to eat?]
Ok, I'm done for the time being.
Article requires login, I accessed it through a different source.
"Then there are the predictions of job loss at soda distributorships, but the same predictions were made about the tobacco industry, and those were wrong. (For that matter, the same predictions were made around the nickel deposit on bottles, which most shoppers don’t even notice.) Ultimately, however, both consumers and government will be more than reimbursed in the form of cheaper healthy staples, lowered health care costs and better health. And that’s a big deal."
Well, thank you for granting one of our own arguments, Mr. Bittman. So I take it that you will agree to eliminating subsidies and protectionist measures in many other industries based on the same logic... "consumers ... will be more than reimbursed in the form of cheaper [goods]. And that's a big deal." I couldn't agree more! Let's start with the sugar subsidy! Next stop: ethanol subsidy!
Road to Serfdom, people. "Problem" -> intervention -> more problems -> more intervention -> ... -> breakdown in economic and social order -> totalitarianism.
Clayton -
I used to believe that when people referred to statism as a religion they were exaggerating. I've recently started to agree with the positions more though. The government is god it will come in, solve a problem, and there will be no negative consequences, nope, none, there never are. The government is efficient and good.
It is a fantasy world. These people are inconsistent for not advocating total health and physical wellbeing being sponsored by government.
if on the NYTimes you ever need to login, just copy and paste the article headline into google and click on it and you won't need to login.
Doesn't the government subsidize corn? and isn't fructose (HFCS) the main negative in making people fat and diabetic? So the government sets up a situation where it is more economic to buy cheap unhealthy foods, then when we follow their social engineering and get fat and diabetic by buying those cheaper unhealthy foods, they want to tax us for it?
FUCK them.
how can we convince people to see through it? It's like we're in the truman show.
I've always said it's that one of the biggest myths in modern politics, up there with racism being an inherently rightist position, is that the left is better than the right on civil liberties. Not that the mainstream right are shining beacons, but the left is, at best, no worse than them (even the most wimpy of drug legalization proposals seem to have dropped off their political radar, and they're only in favour of some drugs while favoring things like tobacco bans and, at least in my country, jihads against alcohol advertising) and in many cases is far, far worse. The Feminazis are just as fanatical as any Jerry Falwell on crusading against "indecency" (or objectification, in their case) and it's the lefties who are advocating all sorts of "sin taxes" and "fat taxes" to punish people who defy the health-nut/anti-Western neo-ascetic dogma. And they're utterly intolerant of any dissent from the PC line, seeking to ban any blasphemy against their religion under the Orwellian noncrime of "hate speech".
I'm sure 100% of us on here agree, Praetyre. Check out this comment I also saw on the article:
I think this is a splendid idea. But, good luck getting it passed by the tea party and their leaders like Michele Bachmann. They like to subsidize Big Oil, ethanol, etc., but have a problem subsidizing something that would actually help the middle class. And I can already hear their screams of Nanny State, even though they want to tell people who they can marry and what they can do with their bodies. Look at how they have even vilified Michele Obama for suggesting that children should get up and exercise. I guess they think it's part of American Exceptionalism that Americans lead the world in diabetes and obesity.
Now this person may just be pointing out hypocrisy of Republicans, which is fine. But if telling people what to do with other people's bodies acts as a criticism, then it would work as a criticism of this article.
"These people are inconsistent for not advocating total health and physical wellbeing being sponsored by government."
This. Government is the deus ex machina that will solve all problems... that is, all problems that I think are a problem but not problems that I don't think are a problem and don't need a magical solution so the decision to go to Yoga class or sit home and watch TV can be left to individuals because, well, because I haven't decided yet that that's a problem that needs Government to swoop in and fix but I've decided* eating junk foods and HFCS drinks (which I will call "sugary drinks" for some inexplicable reason) is such a problem that requires the solver-of-all-problems to solve.
*Or have I? Maybe I'm just repeating the zeitgeist among the circle of people whose cocktail parties I wish I was important enough to get invited to
It's actually quite interesting that they bring up the old line about sin taxes being necessary due to government healthcare... arguments like that are actually what originally led me to discover libertarianism as a philosophy. I realized it was inconsistent on my part to believe in civil liberty to do things like smoke pot (or tobacco) and eat fast food while thinknig that government should provide healthcare to all. Ultimately, it was sort of a paradigm shift in my thinking. I wonder if any others have come through this path...
Well what these people do is conflate two different conceptions of what "freedom" means. There can be freedom to do what you want to do as long as you don't interfere with the freedom of others, and then there is freedom from being affected whatsoever by other people. Most leftists define freedom as the latter term.
What I mean by that is if some result occurs from the nexus of free individuals acting negatively affects you in some fashion, that apparently gives you justification for extorting them and regulating their behavior. Case in point, "eating fattening foods leads to higher health costs for me, so then it becomes society's business!" Of course to some extent, it is "society's" business, but that's because the State made it unecessarily so.
I have a serious question for everyone on this forum; does anyone here think we could actually convert any of these people to libertarianism, or even convince them to pick up any given book on economics?
Rcder, not avid readers of the New York Times. The ones who have accounts and take time out of their day to comment on tripe like this and also praise it. Not them. The few Republican voices however who view the Times as antithetical to their beliefs and view themselves as the opposition have a slight chance at deconversion since they are distrustful of state power and understand the point of the issue ("it's none of your business what I do with my body!" however inconsistent they may be on other issues). The leftists non-chalantly posit these ideas without consideration of how they are going to achieve them. They sit around their computer and say, "obesity is bad. STATE!"
"I know that it is a hopeless undertaking to debate about fundamental value judgments."-Albert Einstein