Joe Teicher: Taxing income may be a disincentive in a generalized fashion, but people often innovate around it, or ignore the disncentive because of their personal drive to be useful and relevant, to be good, worthwhile, useful people.

Regulating with more specificity penalizes good ideas more than bad ideas- because people can generally recognize a bad idea and the majority tends to avoid it anyway. So legislators will focus on regulating the specific behaviours that they personally have an axe to grind against, and this will add an extra-high barrier to activities that have steep trade-offs but are evaluated on an individual level to be worth the trade-off.

Generalized income taxes lower the benefits for everyone, but specific regulation cuts out the margins, where most of the innovation takes place. People will still have to trudge in to work to feed themselves, but drudgery will make up a greater part of the workforce, with rewarding work that advances the human race stultifying.

Once we give some agency, be it congress or the FDA, the power to create a rubric for determining the ‘healthy level’ of foods, lobbyists and bribes from Big Food can’t be far behind.

Not to mention the increased food prices having a greater impact on lower income families.

I always learn something from your posts. Did the number of obese suddenly increase when they began using the BMI as the measure? I don’t know if you happen to know whether the number of the dangerously obese is increasing as a percentage of the population.

Part of the problem with socialization is that moralization enters into the discussion of what is an “invalid” externality and what is not.

If our left-wing blue-state pseudo-intellectual overlords decide to tax or forbid externality producing activities, they will remember to ban motorcycle riding sans helmets (or, perhaps just motorcycle riding), bull riding, mixed martial arts, etc., but will have no problem with proper and sophisticated blue state activities like rock climbing, eco tourism, sexual promiscuity, etc.

Put the right wing authoritarians in charge, and the reverse would be enacted.

There’s no difference between a broken neck from being thrown off a motorcycle and from falling off a rock face.

There’s no difference between arteries clogged from Dunkin Donuts and artiers clogged from Bearnaise sauce.

…but the government officials would see one, sure as heck.

Some would say “but Spiro, they are only taxing the ‘bad’ foods, why should you care?” My answer is – what makes you think they’ll stop there? Especially when, just like smoking, the extra tax does nothing to deter the practice.

Moreover, why aren’t there more historians and well-educated people coming out in outrage against this type of legislation. Am I the only one that sees this as a BIG step toward the government controlling our personal appearance? I mean, it’s not quite eugenics, but….