I don’t know how I missed this op-ed from Friday’s Washington Post:

America is fat and getting fatter. Today 140 million American adults are overweight or obese. Their bodies carry 4 billion pounds of excess fat, the result of eating 14 trillion excess calories.

Numbers of this size belong in the domain of economists, not physicians. And therein lies the solution.

[...]

The first step is realizing that, nationally, weight gain is not a medical problem, it’s a pollution problem.

Food calories are so pervasively and inexpensively available in our environment that they should be regarded as a pollutant. Just as an asthmatic can’t help but inhale pollutants in the air all around him, we Americans cannot help but ingest the calories present in the environment all around us.

I feel I should interrupt here, and remind you that this is not satire. Despite the Swiftian title. I checked. Because it would have been damned good satire.

Carry on:

Public policies have succeeded in reducing air pollution. They can teach us how to reduce calorie pollution. Tradable emission allowances, for example, establish markets where permits to emit air pollutants can be bought and sold. Market forces then provide incentives to reduce pollution emissions.

A program for tradable emission allowances could target foods with a high caloric density, that is, foods with a high number of calories per ounce.

[...]

With such a program, high-density foods would become more expensive and low-density foods would become cheaper. Unlike a tax, the program could be designed so the net cost change to consumers was zero. Thus, consumers who alter their eating habits need pay no more to eat the same number of calories. The hope, which should be tested, is that the number of calories eaten would drop, owing to the difficulty of consuming large numbers of calories from low-density foods. This would then reduce food costs and, ultimately, health-care costs.

[...]

Economically, a calorie-emission trading program would have winners and losers. Some prospective losers would understand that change presents opportunity. They would welcome the program as an impetus to diversify and do the right thing for the public health. Potential losers having a narrower, self-serving vision might resist the program fiercely. We must hope that our political leaders, many of whom are sedentary, overweight and atherosclerotic, would have the courage and good health to face the barrage.

This is what happens when cardiologists make a half-assed stab at economics. I can tell Mr. Sotos that I don’t any narrow, self-serving vision that would cause me to be a “loser” under his program, other than a general appreciation for choice and, um, liberty. But you’re damned right I’d fiercely oppose it.

The only external costs to obesity are the direct result of socialist government programs that distribute costs and devalue personal responbility. Get rid of or nullify the cost-sharing effects of those programs, and obesity becomes a private matter, whose effects are entirely contained in the person who’s obese.

Frankly, it feels a little silly wasting electrons debunking this idea. But there it is. On the op-ed pages of the Washington Post.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 at 1:32 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.