Megan McArtle is unusually mean-spirited in her suggestions for dealing with America's growing obesity problem:
Make discrimination against the overweight not only legal, but mandatory
Encourage health and life insurance companies to jack up their premiums. Make seats in public accomodations, from stadiums to subways, physically impossible for the obese to fit in. Force airlines to charge them for an extra seat.
Also, get their peers to be mean to them. It's no coincidence that the subcultures in which fat is most stigmatised--the white upper middle class ones--are also the ones in which obesity is least prevalent. Don't pay for public health announcements; pay sitcoms to make cruel jokes at the expense of overweight characters, who should all be written as lazy and stupid. Any scenes involving food should show the overweight characters as revolting gluttons, with food running out of their mouths and down their shirts as the other people in the room watch in stunned horror.
Nasty, nasty, nasty. My wife is pleasantly curvy, can work out hard, eat 800 calories a day, and not lose a pound because of a hormonal condition. She's always felt bad about her body, and until we met (at age 27), no one ever told her that she is beautiful. I would hate to live in the society that McArtle is describing.
Anyway, McArtle's response is hardly a libertarian one.
Thursday, March 31, 2005
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2 comments:
Anyway, McArtle's response is hardly a libertarian one.
Sure it is as long as the government doesn't get involved. In fact basically she just wants the government to deregulate obesity discrimination which is very libertarian. Let market forces make obesity as undesirable as possible.
Unfortunately my fiance is in a similar state as your wife. I've gotten noticably porkier since my metabolism cut out in grad school as well.
Well, McArtle is advocating punitive taxes on technologies that sedentary people are more likely to be dependent on and on high-calorie foot, forcing airlines to adopt certain seating prices, and paying broadcasters to make fun of obese people. This doesn't sound like the freeing market forces, but government intervention.
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