Nutrition and the Totalitarian Urge

Today in the New York Times SundayReview columnist Mark Bittman advocates taxing peoples' "bad" food decisions.

He says taxing junk food and using the proceeds to fund programs to encourage healthy eating "could save tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs."

Note the weasel word "could." But even if he is correct, doing so would be so utterly, perniciously, morally wrong that no amount of savings could justify it.

It is not government's job to be peoples' nanny, nor to use the power of government to save some people money at others peoples' expense. The freedom for companies to provide the food that people want and the freedom of people to buy and consume the foods they want is a fundamental human freedom. It is not the purpose of government to attempt to warp the marketplace to try to make us better, more virtuous eaters.

The U.S. government's man objective is not the promotion of safety, health and longevity, but the promotion of liberty. That requires that free citizens not be penalized for making choices at odds with the health nannies.

If one can't be free of tax coercion in the grocery store aisles and one's own refrigerator, in what manner is one actually free, as opposed to a ward of the state, being fed a state-sanctioned diet? It's despicable to think the government has right to take money from me because I like potato chips, in order to try to convince me not to eat potato chips.

If people didn't want these foods, they wouldn't be popular. There are things are more important to people than a few pounds of weight or a few extra years of life, and it's for free citizens to weight their own priorities in that matter, not for our "betters" to try to mold our behaviors to match their preferences.

Furthermore, taxes on undesirable products are economic tautologies. Bittman says: "Simply put: taxes would reduce consumption of unhealthful foods and generate billions of dollars annually."

This tax falls victim to the same uncomfortable cognitive dissonance that tobacco taxes do. Both intend to use the tax on the bad thing to reduce consumption of the bad thing. Of course, government's drug of choice is revenues. Tobacco taxes generate billions in revenues and presumably Bittman is correct that these would, too.

Any revenue government gets it soon regards as necessary. Government would, again, just as in the case of tobacco, become dependent on a revenue source that it has an official interest in stamping out. And, as with tobacco, the revenue would soon be regarded as essential revenue, both because it would not remain solely target for its original purpose (encouraging healthy eating), but also because money is fungible and the more spending the government can categorize, however frivolously, as "encouraging healthy eating" leaves other general revenues available to spend on other programs.

The agencies and programs funded by massive junk food taxes would soon have a large interest in justifying their own existence. Only a fool would think that they would eventually shutter themselves willingly when American eating habits reached a sufficiently healthy level. No, even if junk food consumption (and thus junk food revenues), dropped to zero, we'd be hearing endless impassioned arguments for how important the FDA's Healthy Diet Council (or whatever it would be called) is to Americans, and all the good it does. We'd be stuck with it forever.

Of course, junk food revenue levels would never come anywhere zero, any more than tobacco revenues have or will, because government loves that tasty revenue. Instead it would be used as an excuse to create protected, competition-free junk food cartels, just as the tobacco cartels are protected, squeezing out small producers with onerous regulations and huge financial and regulatory burdens to entering the market.

That's how the hand-in-glove operations of subsidies and regulatory agencies have ALWAYS worked -- in agriculture, automobiles, steel, tobacco, real estate -- everywhere they are used, they distort the market, reduce competition, increase government rent-seeking and promote the protection of established players over new entries to the market.

If people don't like dying 10 years younger because they eat too many potato chips, they'll stop eating potato chips. If they don't stop, it wasn't that important to them, and it's nobody else's business.

Criminal Protection Zones

From PowerLine:

What happened on Utoya island was that the murderer, dressed as a policeman and heavily armed, took a boat to the island, ordered teenagers to assemble around him, and started shooting. His rampage continued, as I understand it, until a SWAT team apparently dispatched from Oslo arrived on the island and shot him. In the meantime, he murdered at least 80 kids.

Many facts are still unknown, but at this point it appears that a key ingredient in the tragedy was the fact that the killer had the only gun on the island. It is, really, one of the ultimate horror scenarios: hundreds of kids, accompanied by a relative handful of adults, isolated on an island with a crazed killer. The outcome might have been very different if some of those adults had been armed.

This hits pretty close-to-home for me, in a way. I dropped my daughter off this past Sunday for a week at horse camp. On the doorway to the dining hall where we checked in was a "No Guns" sign. It always ticks me off when I see those on private property in Ohio -- putting one up is purely voluntary, and they carry the force of law in Ohio, but all it ensures is that honest, law-abiding people won't have guns there.

Do they even stop to consider that someone legitimately dangerous won't care one bit about that sign?

Who is protecting my daughter from a deranged gunman at that camp if all the honest people are disarmed?

Iranian President Wants to Openly Develop Nukes

Iranian President Wants to Openly Develop Nukes

VIENNA -- Iran's president wants to shed the nation's secrecy and forge ahead openly with developing nuclear weapons but is opposed by the clerical leadership, which is worried about international reaction to such a move, says an intelligence assessment shared with The Associated Press.

Wait, you mean all those denials over the years have been a cover-up? No way! God, our leaders are idiots.

Retrospective: The Flying Imams

Many people remember the story of the Flying Imams -- a group of Imams who were removed from a US Airways flight due to suspicious behavior and who then sued everyone involved.

Fewer are probably aware, that in the end, the Imams won:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/148tyfxg.asp?page=2

One of the judge's statements from the decision is interesting:

"But when a law enforcement officer exercises the power of the Sovereign over its citizens, she or he has a responsibility to operate within the bounds of the Constitution and cannot raise the specter of 9/11 as an absolute exception to that responsibility."

That being the case, can one then assume that TSA agents must also, therefore, operate within the bounds of the Constitution and cannot use the specter of 9/11 as an absolute exception to the responsibility to respect my Fourth Amendment rights?

Shared suffering

From Michael Walsh, in the New York Post:

On Aug. 3, the day after America supposedly goes broke, the president flies to Chicago for a couple of 50th-birthday fund-raisers — at up to $38,500 a pop.

Then it’s off to Martha’s Vineyard, where the first family will spend a week or so on yet another vacation, at the 28-acre Blue Heron Farm, which comes complete with its own basketball court, pool and boathouse.

For at least one American family, times have never been so good. Too bad the rest of us can’t say the same.

Why evangelize?

I don't intend this to be primarily a religious or Christian blog, but I thought I'd open with something that's been on my mind lately.

I'm a Christian, just not a good Christian. As Paul might (and did) say "the foremost of sinners." Well, that's hyperbole, but certainly I'm no model of sainthood.

I think I have the basics, though:

1. First off, I understand that I am a sinner. It seems like a lot of people have a hard time with that step. People want to think of themselves as good.
2. I can't successfully stop sinning. It's just part of my nature.
3. God condemns sin. Uh-oh!
4. Forgiveness of sin is available through faith in Jesus Christ -- being born again through Christ's sacrifice. Yay!
   
5. Even after being born again, I still sin. *sigh*

Now, I'm not going to go off on a big thing about works versus faith -- that's always a popular point of contention for different Christian traditions with the radical view on one end being "I'm saved by faith, not works; once I'm born again I'm saved no matter what, so I don't have to worry about my sin or doing good works. God loves me and forgives me through my acceptance of Christ's sacrifice," and the other end being "Faith without works is dead -- if I'm not busting my butt to avoid sin, live as Christ would want me to and do good works, my faith (and thus my salvation) is not real."

Me, I just muddle along in the middle doing the best I can. I'm just going to have to see what God has to say about the job I did when I get there. He's a just God, right? Whatever he decides, I can hardly complain, right? I trust him to do the right thing as he sees it, and I recognize that it's possible what God thinks is the right thing may be something with which I am not happy.

Which brings me to my next point (and the subject of the post):

When Christians start listing the attributes of God, "just" is usually right up there in the top five or so: Loving, All-Knowing, All-Powerful, Just, Merciful, those are all real biggies. I'm sure if you're the type to ponder these things you can think of a few more to toss on there.

Anyway.

I became a Christian in an evangelical Church. Really big on the "Great Commission" -- "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." Whether you were "witnessing" and "sharing the Gospel" was always on one's mind.

Unfortunately, I've always been troubled by this. Never felt the evangelical urge, even a little. I'm not a very social person, and I have little patience with trying to educate people. And I see logical flaws with the whole concept of an obligation to evangelize.

God's Just, right? He's not going to give me a better chance at salvation than some isolated Amazon tribesman just because I had the good fortune to be born with easy access to Christian literature and teachings, right?

One presumes that God wants everyone to have a fair chance at salvation. Furthermore, God is omnipotent and omniscient (those are pretty daunting labels, but typically God is regarded as having all power and knowledge that it's possible to have). It logically follows that if God wants that, God is going to get that. Regardless of what I do.

That Amazonian tribesman is going to get just as fair a shake at salvation at me, regardless of whether I pack off on a missionary journey to tell him about Jesus Christ. In fact, it would be presumptuous and blasphemous of me to presume that I could possibly thwart God's will for that tribesman. I mean -- God is God. I don't have that kind of power. My particular interpretation of Christianity is not Calvinist -- I believe we have free will, and I believe the tribesman has the free will to reject God. But, I believe that if God wills that the tribesman get a fair shot at making that decision, no one on earth can stop it.

I mean, think about it. Put yourself in the tribesman's shoes, "You mean I'm getting short-changed on getting my sins forgiven because some dude 4,000 miles away decided that trekking through the Amazon wasn't for him? Seriously? And God's letting it happen?" It seems ridiculous to think that God would operate that way.

So, why, exactly, would I be interested in evangelizing? God doesn't need me to do it. He's got the resources to get the job done himself. Clearly. I can only think of ultimately selfish reasons -- getting on God's good side, sucking up to him by being eager to be his tool to reach that tribesman.

You may say, "But if you are so thankful for God's salvation, don't you want to show love for God and others by being an active part of his plan?" Well, not exactly. I've never been fond of busy work. So, if a God of nigh-infinite powers and resources is determined to give the guy a fair shake regardless of what I do, I don't feel as if I'm really contributing a lot by being the particular, convenient agency.

Apply the reasoning to pretty much any mundane task you might be called on to do. Say you work at a dam, and your boss tells you that it's your job to open the overflow valves when the water rises to a certain level ... but you know that A) Those valves are already automated and there are fail-safes on the fail-safes. B) The boss is standing right there with you and even if the fail-safes on the fail-safes fail, he's going to turn the valve anyway -- and doing so won't take him away from any other vital task. Wouldn't you start wondering exactly what value you're bringing to the whole endeavor?

There are a lot of things in my life that I don't know God is going to do -- keeping my littlest daughter from running out into the street, making sure all my kids get good educations, and keeping bad people away from them. God doesn't really promise us a lot in our day-to-day lives. Many theologians have spent much time trying to explain why bad things happen to good people, and why the God of whom Jesus says, regarding sparrows, "not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father's will" lets little children "fall to the ground" every day.

I accept that God's ultimate spiritual purpose for us is so much more significant than our brief lives as to render the temporal events we perceive as tragedies meaningless in comparison, but I still have to get through that temporal existence and I have responsibilities close to home. God isn't going to cook my kids a meal or dress them or feed my dogs. If God wants that Amazonian tribesman's soul saved -- and it's my understanding that he does -- then God is in a far better position than me to make sure it gets done.