Hide the Oreos Earl! The food police are coming! Part 1

Well of course it isn’t that bad yet but those who wish to force the “Nanny State” on all of us have a new public health enemy #1 – junk food.

From the city that implemented sweeping smoking bans we now have a proposed ban on trans fats. This week former President Bill Clinton announced another initiative to get junk food out of schools and promote healthier snacks because “the nation's childhood obesity epidemic and skyrocketing health-care costs made immediate action essential.”

It all seems very innocuous and it is for our own good so what’s the problem? In answer to that question let us look at a previous public health enemy #1 – tobacco.

It is in the war on tobacco where we find the genesis of the “Nanny State”. The war on tobacco also began as an effort to protect children. The government banned tobacco companies from advertising in certain magazines and on television. Then the government forbade the sale of tobacco products to minors. Next government forced the tobacco companies to put warning labels on tobacco products.

You may be asking your self what is wrong with the government doing all those things. Tobacco products shouldn’t be promoted or sold to children and the public ought to know the dangers of using tobacco products. You might even say the government had an obligation to do these things.

But does it really? In spite of all the recent law suits claiming the contrary, didn’t people already know that smoking was bad for them? Yes. Were we encouraging our children to smoke? Of course not. So why was it necessary for the government to get involved in all this? The reason is twofold; revenue in the form of “sin taxes” and to build a basis for controlling adult behavior.

Once you have the public agreeing that the government should legislate the sale and use of tobacco products to protect children, it is not difficult to then convince the public that the government needs to legislate adult use of tobacco products. Combine a steady drumbeat of tobacco industry conspiracy theories with a little junk science that allegedly proves that secondhand smoke is deadly to non-smokers and you can start banning the use of tobacco in certain places. Eventually, you can ban tobacco completely by making it illegal.

Why hasn’t the government made tobacco illegal? Two words; sin tax. The government has made billions in sin taxes from tobacco. Federal, state and local governments have all benefited from tax revenues generated by demonizing tobacco products then taxing them on the basis that they are evil. The public has become so well indoctrinated to the idea that evil tobacco must pay that it is now ludicrously easy to pass laws to increase the taxes on tobacco products.

For example, two years ago, the state of Oklahoma proposed a bill to increase the sales tax on cigarettes in order to make cigarettes so expensive that minors could not afford to buy them. The revenue from this tax was to be used to fund a program to educate children about the hazards of smoking and to help smokers quit smoking.

I don’t want children smoking any more than the next person but the idea that children will smoke if cigarettes are cheap so the solution is to make them expensive is idiotic and disingenuous. I doubt that very many people will give up smoking or be dissuaded from starting smoking because of the cost. Were that the primary purpose of the bill, one might expect lawmakers to come up with a better solution.

The actual purpose of the bill was to evoke the public’s negative feelings about tobacco use and the desire to punish that behavior by taxing it. In that respect, the bill was a resounding success because it passed and became law. Now the state has a new source of revenue and as one might expect, the revenue has been diverted from the proposed purpose (educating children about smoking and helping smokers quit) and put to other uses.

So what does tobacco have to do with junk food? I will address that question in part 2.