Daniel Drezner opines on Hardee’s Monster Thickburger, a foodstuff that is to burgers what John Holmes was to male genitalia. And of couese, the health mullahs are reacting with the usual breathless idiocy:
“This is the epitome of corporate irresponsibility, marketing this kind of junk,” said Michael Jacobson, from the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “We call this kind of product food porn.”
Food porn? I thought that usually involved zuchini and… um, never mind. In all seriousness, so what? Yes, this burger is monstrously unhealthy. But the last time I checked so was eating a plate of fudge, smoking a few cigarettes, and licking that sweet, sweet puddle of spilled antifreeze on the garage floor. And by God, if you want to do any of those things, the Center for Pseudoscience in the Interest of Scaring the Crap out of People should butt the hell out of it.
This is another example of nanny-statism on the micro level. The slow erosion of freedom in the name of someone else’s prurient interests is just as much as a feature of the left as it is of the right. From California’s asinine ban on smoking in bars (as if drinking cheap booze and trying to hop in the sack with some floozy who undoubtedly has more diseases than a CDC lab weren’t unhealthy enough) to the environmentalist lobby dictating what cars we should drive, we’re only seeing the natural progression of what happens when a society starts accepting that State Knows Best. After all, if we accept that people are just too dumb to save for their retirements, it’s not much a step to say that people are dumb enough that a picture of a juicy burger will leave them as mind-numbed zombies shambling through the streets moaning “beeeeefff…. beeeeeeeefffffffff!”
Of course, that’s why the whole concept of personal responsibility comes in. The idea that the state has the job of liberating us from making bad choices stands in direct contrast to the whole concept of government in this country — a concept that can be distilled into one simple maxim: “leave me the hell alone.”
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have this strange craving for a nice juicy burger…
Unbelievable. We’ve finally found an issue that we agree on. I may have to rethink my position…..
Seriously though, the current course towards nanny-statism seems unlikely to slow down any time soon. The smoking bans in bars are now prominent in conservative bastions in Texas, Kansas, Arkansas and even the tobacco-growing Mecca of Lexington, Kentucky. The erosion of smokers’ freedoms is the latest chapter in a long history of the majority voting away the rights of a minority, so it’s hardly a surprise in an era where suburbanites are convinced the gravest threat to their wellness is a few minutes of exposure to second-hand cigarette smoke. However, the trend towards widespread acceptance of a health-and-wellness police state is becoming clear even excluding the dreaded evil weed. Just last week, USA Today expressed its tolerance to the concept of government raiding our refrigerators and junk food pantries with the proverbial “Twinkie tax.” I’d give San Franciscans no less than a year before they impose the first of what will become many rounds of sin taxes on “junk food”.
As with every other bit of propaganda regularly sold to the public as fact, the premise that we desperately need to save Americans from their own appetites with the jackboot of government regulators will gain widespread national acceptance. The appalingly fictitious premise of soaring health care costs associated with unhealthy lifestyles will be used as effectively to justify regressive taxes on junk food as it is currently with cigarettes. From there, we’ll likely plunge into an entire shadow consumer culture where shady black marketeers are able to offer tax-free legal products ranging from McDonalds burgers to Marlboros to Milky Way bars at their market value rather than the tax-inflated store prices. In short, the coming nanny-state sin taxes will basically equate to a quasi-prohibition…as if this country doesn’t have enough of them already.
So enjoy your trip to Hardee’s today. One way or another, government is gonna slap that Monster Thickburger right out of your jaws tomorrow.
I agree. I find the government’s do-gooder aspects a bit much. However, the same ones that will tell you what you should or should not do are the same ones that will bail you out after you fail to heed their warning. And thus, we are all eventually affected by other’s gluttonous behavior. The resulting question that arises by not preventing people from eating themselves into an unhealthy state and foregoing any planning for old age is: Who pay for their care when the inevitable occurs? Do we pass them by hold up in their homeless self-made shelters and compliment them on their exercise of freedom? Are they future inhabitants of the welfare state – which we then pay for what they did not pay? Is there anyway we could get people who live on fast food and live on money today what they should save to live on tomorrow to sign a disclaimer freeing us from the obligation to care for them?
Remember when you see someone practicing a majority of the seven deadly sins – which in this country is and should continue to be their right to do so – those sins come home to roost on us all. We pay for their freedom. Ask not for whom the bells toll.
scout, from a financial aspect, those who live unhealthy lifestyles today will save taxpayers billions in the long run. The longer one lives, the higher their lifetime medical care costs run. Obese chain-smokers who die in their 40s and 50s will never require a decade worth of intensive care for Alzheimer’s like a rising share of their healthy counterparts will. In short, the premise that unhealthy lifestyle choices produces these extraordinary cost burdens to government is pure fantasy. In the long run, they provide a net cost benefit.
From a purely financial standpoint, the government’s best practice would be to encourage smoking and obesity. However, that would run counter to the interests of insurance companies who provide health care for unhealthy employees….and the medical bills that arise from the unhealthy is a financial strain during their working years. That’s the conundrum. The healthy young of today will be the expensive old of tomorrow, so what’s in the best financial interest of private insurers who cover individuals up to age 65 is far different from the financial interest of government who covers individuals over the age of 65.
Mark, “pure fantasy� Pure: untainted, unpolluted, with no foreign contamination, and in and of itself unnatural and unrealistic. Fantasy: not just fictitious or exaggerated but unreal with attitude, not pixilated but pixyish. I have not been pure for quite some time, and I thought I had also left fantasy land many years ago for the hard core real world, but you seem to think otherwise.
While I agree with you and a host of heath care professionals that an unhealthy lifestyle means a short trip into old age, it’s those last few years that are so costly. Lung cancer is still a major in the cancer league with little or no hope for sustained survival, but however short the interval is we’re could be talking thousands of $ a day. Emphysema can last and be treated at high cost for many years before death comes – many times from the complications of other previously unhealthy bad habits.
As for heart disease, I agree that if the person does not survive his first heart attack, society has indeed saved money. But how many have to survive before the money we saved is wiped out by their continued treatment? I admit I don’t know the statistic for those that do make life style changes that prevent further attacks and the costly complications of continuing heart disease. Anecdotally, what I’ve seen is that those that have no self control when they were young had little to none after their heart attack.
My cost for heath care almost doubled were I work, but the heath care provider has recognized the subject we are tossing back and forth, and those who participate in documented healthy behavior receive a deduction in their cost. We are all bearing the cost of health care whether private or public, but those that choose to live a lifestyle that does not contribute but mitigates these costs are recognized – which I appreciate, although due to some previously bad habits I can not fully realize the entire economic benefit.
Who do you think ran up most health care bills in their lifetime….ex-President Ronald Reagan or ex-Beatle George Harrison? The answer to this simple analagous question quite accurately disputes the widely-accepted premise that the healthy are cheaper than the unhealthy. As I said before, the cost dynamic couldn’t be more different for insurance companies that cover employees and the Medicare that covers seniors (and thus most sick people). Either way, America’s future is certain to produce far more Ronald Reagans (long-term Alzheimer patients) than George Harrisons (57-year-old lung cancer deaths). From the standpoint of health care financing, it’s hard to imagine how this could be anything but devastating to already depleting federal coffers.
I can’t agree that nanny-statism is just as bad on the Left as on the Right. This silly business with the food hardly compares with the draconian crap supported by the Right light forcing schools to teach creationism, passing laws against homosexuals, and imprisoning people indefinitely without trial.