Early on in his administration, before Obama became an anarcho-socialist, he pitched a very fair-minded frame for the two sides of the abortion debate: regardless of where you fell on the practice or its legality, both sides could agree that we wanted fewer abortions. The compromise—focusing on the real world effects of the issue rather than its ideological abstractions—actually brought the two sides within viewing distance of each other for a hot minute in 2008.
Something similar seems to be in order to bridge the gap between Mayor-For-Life Mike Bloomberg's proposed ban on any sugar drink in a greater-than-16 oz. serving and those who didn't even let him finish enunciating the idea before hitting the rigged-up "fascist" button on their keyboard (control+command+F). Wherever you fall on the spectrum of government participation/intrusion into personal consumption, we can all agree that the problem of obesity needs to be fixed before it grows unmanageable. So why is only one side bringing policy solutions to the table?
(Off the bat: PoliticOlogy's got no dog in this fight. I'm no fan of Bloomberg's proposed ban, or of soda for the matter. Try to ban coffee and we'll have words.)
Bloomberg's proposed ban is attempt to manage the problem of obesity, which is gearing up to be a seismic, and unimaginably expensive, health crisis. Under Bloomberg's ban, if you really want a 32 oz. Mountain Dew, you'll have to order two 16 ouncers, and the act of actually purchasing and then holding more than one soda might make you stop and wonder whether you need both. Such a pause, times a few years, might lead people to wonder how much they need soda at all. There's also the issue of developing good habits among children. Kids don't plop from the womb wanting 64 ounces of Sprite; they're taught by their environment to want it. If soda isn't available in large quantities, by the time they're old enough to contemplate buying four 16 oz. cups of Sprite, they'll also be old enough to know better (we hope).
But government manipulation of environmental factors raises immediate fears of Big Brother barging into your personal life. In fact, a soda ban was brought up during the Affordable Care Act SCOTUS hearings as the next step of nanny stateism. While "you can pry this Big Gulp from my cold dead hands" doesn't have much of an inspirational ring to it, sodas are a ubiquitously-consumed enough product that the specter of their being prohibited strikes a democratic chord. It's the very frivolity of soda that's so chilling: if the government is so concerned with the behavior of its citizens as to regulate the consumption of a cup of coke, where does it stop? For someone who should have seen this "radical curtailing of freedom" response from a mile away, Bloomberg didn't help himself by saying, "We're not taking away anybody's right to do anything. We're simply forcing you to understand." Y'know, that sounds...kinda fascist.
It's not, of course, as nothing anybody has done that has prompted the label fascist in the United States has ever actually approached fascism*. It's a stupid word that's used by wanna-be rebels who construct their own estimation of themselves in the refraction of imaginary enemies: it's one thing to tweet against a mayor's soda ban; it's another to fight CREEPING FASCISM.
But those who yell "fascism" aren't always wrong so much as hyperbolic, especially when they argue that the intrusion of government onto personal decisions isn't just worrisome because of the curtailing of freedom, but because the assumption of responsibility by the government disincentivizes people from learning to make good decisions on their own. If the state removes choice, how will you ever learn how to choose?
The problem with this line of argument is it fails to even attempt to solve the problem of obesity. Those who scoff at Bloomberg's ban have not put forward any substantive policy solutions designed to reduce the consumption of unhealthy food, especially among children. Attempts by schools to change eating habits have been met with scorn; attempts by schools to coach parents to pack their children healthier lunches have prompted cries of nanny statism. The conservative response to obesity on a larger level has been simply to attack Democrats for being worried about it, often with a mean-spirited joke about Michelle Obama.
Take a trip over to the Heritage Foundation's website and click on their "Obesity" page. You'll see only three entires from the think tank—three!—all of them complaining about Obama and nanny statism, in those words. Click on the first headline and read as Ryan McNulty takes a CNN writer to task for advocating "supply side" solutions to sugar intake, such as raising taxes and aggressively informing the public of the health effects of sugar. McNulty parries the writer's arguments fairly well, makes a nanny state reference, and signs off with a warning about the creep of big government. Nowhere in the article does he propose a single alternative solution to reduce sugar intake. Nowhere in the article does he propose anything. Nowhere on the Heritage Foundation's website does anybody propose anything.
This is not just a problem of argumentation. The cost of obesity will be born by all of us. It is already ballooning health care costs, a burden that will affect the health care industry and the economy as a whole. As one blog put it simply, "Fat is fiscal." The Heritage Foundation, before it joined the chorus against Obamacare, created the template for the health care mandate, reasoning that all of us paying in now would reduce health care costs in the future. Under the same logic, shouldn't they have an idea or two about free market solutions designed to prevent the present behavior that contributes to obesity from ballooning health care costs in the future? And given that this overwhelming increase in health care costs is one of the primary factors that prompted the ACA's expansion of government further into the health care system, wouldn't the Heritage Foundation want to make a conservative case for healthy eating now, rather than have to argue the against the big government case for state-sponsored health care expansion later?
Apparently not. Nobody on the side that likes to cavil about big government or nanny statism or fascism has any idea what to do about obesity, even as the problem challenges the idea of personal responsibility that (supposedly) forms the backbone of their ideology.
Mayor-for-life Bloomberg's ban is ill-conceived (this writer would favor greater deployment of information, along the lines of the requirement that fast food restaurants post calorie counts), but at least it acknowledges the nature and severity of the problem. If PoliticOlogy were a betting blog, it would put the price of a 64 oz. soda on Bloomberg's ban never becoming a reality; the arguments against it are too portable, and the justifications for it too awkward and suspect. In the end, it's easier to echo angry tweets about the nanny state than it is to seriously consider a health policy that, even if you concede its appropriateness, you still don't like.
But the other side needs to start offering substantive public health policies. As Obama showed for a split second in 2008, when the two sides can agree on the real world consequences of policy, the rigidness of ideology can relent, even if momentarily. Those against Bloomberg's ban need to stop mocking it and come up with something better. And if they can't, then I hope they enjoy their diminutive sodas, a proportional reward for their unserious contribution to a serious debate.
(* Except for rendition, torture, assassination of American citizens without a trial, and anything else related to counterterrorism. A blog post for another time.)
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