I heard something today which made me really angry, Some socialist totalitarian think-tank (sponsored by the government, surprise surprise) wants the state to have even more control over your lives.The attack on your liberty will come from an unexpected direction though, The Foresight report suggests that obesity, yes obesity, has reached epidemic levels and the government must do something.
It all comes down to how much the ‘epidemic’ is going to cost, £45bn by the year 2050 apparently. All in terms of health care and lost work hours. I’m guessing that the lost work hours is the most worrying to those in power. If everyone is too fat to go to work then the economy will collapse, sounds hyperbolic but that’s exactly what they’re feeding you.
We are to be encouraged to exercise, our food intake should be even more regulated than it is already and I wouldn’e be surprised if it became a crime to eat fast food. Of course all this will be done ‘for our own good.’
My opinion is going to ruffle a few feathers, and that is its purpose. Taken to its logical extreme, my political inclination would have the government abandon those who insist on overfeeding themselves to their fate. Let them gorge themselves on whatever crap they want and let them die of malnutrition, heart disease, stroke and all the other obesity related afflictions, they brought it on themselves after all.
There is evidence that obesity affects fertility and sex drive, not to mention attractiveness to the opposite sex, so the likely hood of these people breeding is small. Evolutionary forces will make themselves felt and the obese will no longer be a problem. Denying benefits to the obese would also make sense, If they wanted to eat they would have to work.
Any parent who abuses their child by allowing them to become obese, should have that child removed from their care and not be given any contact. There is hope in the case of children, they can be educated, they are dependant after all.
My main gripe is this though; the government has no business telling people what they should be doing with their own bodies. If someone wants to kill themselves with food then that’s their business, all that society (which is not that state, the distinction is important) can do is try and tell them that they’re killing themselves and offer to help them overcome their condition. Forcing them into treatment that they don’t want, and I don’t want to pay for, is inhumane in both directions.
The above response to the situation is extreme, but so is allowing the state to get its filthy fingers into every facet of our lives. Hayek, in the road to serfdom, talked about a government attempting to control an economy by brute forcemand this attempt leading to totalitarianism. As in the example of Communism, where all means of production are brought under state control. Think about it, ultimately the means of production are people.
When the state controls every aspect of your life, for your own good you understand, then it controls the means of production. We are destined to become a herd, a resource to be farmed, numbered, and treated like the cattle they see us as. We are the economy going, and under the guise of managing it the government will strip us of our freedom, dignity and humanty.
(BBC, Obestiy ‘as bad as climate risk’.)
