Here come the Fat Police

“Big Gulps” are in the news, courtesy of New York City’s persistently paternalistic mayor, Michael Bloomberg.

Bloomberg’s proposed Big Gulp ban arises from a simplistic three-step calculus, beginning with the undeniable proposition that Americans are fat, followed by the more arguable proposition that such fatness constitutes a national health “crisis,” finishing with the much less tenable conclusion that banning large, fizzy drinks will make us skinnier.

When we switch from ends to means, the most obvious question is why Hizzoner thinks he is a better judge of New Yorkers’ interests than they themselves are.

We might enjoy big sodas, but Bloomberg thinks this is a bad thing to enjoy. He seeks to make us make better choices by taking our ability to choose away. The temptation to do bad (or at least unhealthy) things will be removed by removing the option of succumbing to it.

Implicit in this dictation by New York’s little would-be dictator is an apparently high level of dissatisfaction with his subjects; New Yorkers (and presumably the rest of us) just don’t “measure up” to the good mayor’s standards (no pun intended).

A subtle shift occurs in these instances, reflective of the age; in which it is our putative “leaders” who make demands upon us, rather than the other way around, becoming, in essence, our masters rather than our servants.

Although the citizenry may have no interest whatsoever in dictating to their mayor what he should and shouldn’t eat, he apparently feels no compulsion to return the favor, even in the most minute and trivial of matters (soft drinks??!!).

Of particular interest is that the distinction between child and adult is nicely elided over here—we are no longer removing soda machines from public schools to combat child obesity, a step which many of us would have no problem supporting, but removing the soda machine from their parents, on the assumption that they themselves are little more than overgrown children (and need their nanny, come in the form of Bloomberg).

A second element in the idea of the “Big Gulp” as teachable moment involves the often subtle loss of liberty that occurs when government assumes the cost for things.

Bloomberg’s ban would have no support of any kind were it not for the old adage that he who pays the piper calls the tune. The more we ask government to do for us, the more government restricts our liberties as it does those things (a process called “regulation”). If government is going to pick up the tab for our health costs, and if “unhealthy” habits drive up such costs, the argument flows easily that government has a right to regulate our habits that influence health. Nothing government does comes free, and sometimes the coin of payment arrives in incremental losses of freedom.

Finally, what one pundit called the “sugary slope” inevitably comes into play—once the principle is established that government has the right to dictate what we can and cannot consume to hold down health costs, what can it not dictate (particularly when considering that everything we do has at least some relationship to health)? How, in other words, do you not get onto a slippery slope that leads to ever-more government regulation of ever-more swaths of life?

The same general problem that afflicts the insurance mandate in Obama care comes into play again here, which is the persistent inability of liberalism to get off the perpetual motion machine of expanding government’s role in our lives because it doesn’t have a “stop” switch.

Put differently, why stop with big sodas? Wouldn’t it make a bigger contribution to a healthy citizenry to ban buffets in restaurants? And to get rid of Dunkin’ Donuts and all those Doritos and Cheetos on the grocery-store shelves?

And if we’re really talking health here, how can we continue to permit the legal sale of tobacco and alcohol products, which are, by any stretch of the imagination, far greater threats to the health of the body politic than 32-ounce Cokes?

Liberalism forces us to ask such questions because the logic of liberalism leads directly, unavoidably to them. The “if this, then why not that” comes quickly to mind because it will, inevitably, come to the mind, if it hasn’t already, of people like Bloomberg.

After all, who even a couple of decades ago would have responded with anything but laughter at the idea of banning big sodas? Government now shapes and molds us. If we have the “wrong” ideas (by liberalism’s definition) or engage in what liberals decide is unhealthy behavior, then we must be corrected. Why? Because we are part of a broader organism called “society” —history’s most dangerous word, because it’s so permissive of tyranny in the “public interest”— and what affects us thereby also affects it.

Those who support initiatives like Bloomberg’s remind us that this is really nothing new, and that government has been in the business of protecting people from themselves for a long time now.

To which a proper libertarian response would be—yes, and it should stop. Immediately.