The Tyranny of Weight Control

[efoods]Once again, the U.S. government is busy producing a series of frenzied health “findings,” making the case that the assorted health problems plaguing Americans keep getting worse, they can’t be solved on an individual basis, and therefore it’s a collective problem that demands an aggressive intervention on the part of bureaucrats through a series of central-planning policies. This article from the Wall Street Journal gives publicity to the government’s obsession with stamping out one health issue in particular, obesity. A couple of snippets from the article claim,

“Obesity and with it diabetes are the only major health problems that are getting worse in this country, and they’re getting worse rapidly,” he said.

Change is needed on many fronts, he added. “Reversing obesity is not going to be done successfully with individual effort.”

These words were verbalized by Thomas Friedan, the new director of the CDC (Center for Disease Control). Obesity and diabetes are two of the government’s favorite “wars,” and this is because the epidemic of obesity, which tends to be a chief cause of diabetes in adults, can pave way for a series of centrally-planned food and prescription drug policies that can be passed off, with minimal effort, as a collective cure to the masses. In fact, solving America’s fat problem, on an aggregate scale, would provide government with wide-ranging powers over individuals and their day-to-day lifestyles. This has government officials – federal, state, and local – salivating over the prospect of such an enormous level of control through policy-wonking and special interest baiting.

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This article was posted: Tuesday, August 11, 2009 at 5:30 pm

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