This month’s Esquire features a lengthy article by Joshua Foer on Irwin Leba, an eccentric Texas who wants to institute a federal tax on people based on body weight. I read the article when it came out, mentally shrugged it off as the usual Nanny State BS, and reminded myself to save it for my files.

Apparently the article is a hoax — an April Fool’s day joke perpetrated by Foer, Esquire, and Alan Abel, described in this Washington Post article as “America’s most famous hoaxter.”

What’s weird is that it never occured to me that the article could be a hoax. On it’s face, the proposal put forth by Abel acting as Leba is really no more ridiculous than anything proposed by John Banzhaf, Kelly Brownell, CSPI, or any of the other usual gang of healthist busybodies.

I’m not the only one. The hoax apparently completely escaped Esquire’s fact-checkers, most of its readers, and considering that the issue’s been out for nearly three weeks now, most of the media. The Post just figured out the joke on Saturday, after visiting the fake website for Leba’s fake think tank, and finding a hidden message revealing the prank.

Tells you just how deep into this obesity nonsense we’ve fallen.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 31st, 2006 at 2:02 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Nanny State, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.