Conservatives push back against NY’s fat war
The influential Weekly Standard has called out New York Governor David Paterson for trying to make obesity “the new smoking.”
“The anti-smoking campaign shows how to turn a private vice requiring tolerance and indulgence into a public offense demanding regulation and official censure,” writes essayist Andrew Ferguson. “Paterson is following the campaign step by step.”
He also zings the city of Binghamton for banning anti-fat prejudice: “Its new law reinforces the view that obesity, like sex or race, is an unchangeable condition deserving civil rights protection,” Ferguson writes.
The governor and the Binghamton city council acted independently, of course, but together they’ve concocted a perfectly progressive two-pronged approach, a one-two punch, a regulatory pincer movement designed to eliminate, all at once and simultaneously, not only discrimination against the obese but also the obese themselves.
Conservatives have been up in arms about so-called Big Mac taxes for years. But there is a deeper — and more interesting — debate at play here.
How should societies react when public health risks emerge, particularly triggered by things like smoking, drug use, drinking, unprotected sex, and gluttony that are “choice” behaviors?
Outright prohibition doesn’t seem to work very well. A case in point being our current Drug War.
But the cigarette approach, while controversial, seems pretty effective. Pump up the taxes, ratchet up the “soft” restrictions, and boom.
“The campaign against smoking was progressivism’s greatest recent success,” Ferguson argues. “Over a span of 20 years, an ancient human weakness once enjoyed by nearly half the population and quietly tolerated by the other half became virtually outlawed.”
The benefits of the cigarette campaign are self-evident and there is growing evidence that obesity is a widespread and legitimate “epidemic.”
But is a Big Mac comparable to a pack of Marlboros?
I only know one thing: They better not come for my gin and tonic.
