The influential Weekly Standard has called out New York Governor David Paterson for trying to make obesity “the new smoking.”<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
Outright prohibition doesn’t seem to work very well. A case in point being our current Drug War. <\/p>\n
But the cigarette approach, while controversial, seems pretty effective. Pump up the taxes, ratchet up the “soft” restrictions, and boom.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
The benefits of the cigarette campaign are self-evident and there is growing evidence that obesity is a widespread and legitimate “epidemic.” <\/p>\n
But is a Big Mac comparable to a pack of Marlboros? <\/p>\n
I only know one thing: They better not come for my gin and tonic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The influential Weekly Standard has called out New York Governor David Paterson for trying to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}