Footing the chocolate-bar bill
Ilike a candy bar now and then. More now than then to be honest, which is why my BMI hovers between overweight and obese. Last weekend, I hauled my decaying carcass through the Coatesville half marathon in a forlorn attempt to bring my total kilograms closer to my IQ and as a reward ate half my bodyweight over lunch. Washed down with Coke.
It’s a losing battle, I know that, but it’s my battle. No-one else’s.
Last weekend in this paper Simon Thornley from some wowser league calling itself FIZZ and Jenesa Jeram from right-wing think-tank the NZ Initiative battled over the issue of a sugar tax.
Thornley, like all puritans, wants to use the government to impose his utopia. His argument can be unfairly whittled down to an assertion that poor people are too stupid to know what is good for them and we are going to starve them until they are
thin.
Jeram rebutted that a sugar tax isn’t going to work because if people want sugar they can find many substitutes.
Both argued their case by referencing the effect on the public purse. Thornley claimed that starving poor people meant the government would spend less on diabetes. Jeram countered that dead people consume less health and super.
The argument boils down to the proposition: Does a sugar tax work?
Let’s ask a broader question: Where does the state get the moral authority to try to influence what we shovel down our cavernous pie holes?
I’d like to cry it has no right, but I would be wrong. We have a single-payer healthcare system.
The government has an interest in what you eat because it will pick up the tab for your healthcare.
If you expect the state to pay for your diabetic amputations then Health Minister Jonathan Coleman has a valid interest in your cholesterol and if that image upsets you, be thankful I resisted the temptation to reference prostate cancer.
Once we abrogated the responsibility for paying for our own healthcare we gave someone else a legitimate right to pry into our most intimate activities.
A sugar tax, fat tax, refusing citizenship to sick people are all logical outcomes of such a bargain.
It is a dangerous road we are on. We have abandoned not just the idea of personal responsibility but the practice of it.