SOLO-NZ Op-Ed: How Do You Know It's Christmas? The Food Nazis Are out Again!

Mark Hubbard
December 27, 2011

The festive season always brings out the Food Nazi killjoys. This year Herr Tony Falkenstein, ONZM, chief executive of Just Water International, has goose-stepped up to the plate in the Herald, arguing for an even bigger Nanny State to jail free men and women in.

I’m growing tired of writing this refutation every year, but it must be done, on principle, because the notion of a fat tax now comes up so regularly I can guarantee you some well-intentioned politicians will be writing it into their manifestos, given the road to every Gulag has always been paved by the best of intentions of the arrogant know-alls for the little people who can’t be left alone to run their own lives.

Needless to say, Herr Falkenstein opens by expounding the well-intentioned reason for why he wishes to have a fat tax for the utopian Gulag of Good Intentions he would impose on us:

We now have two newer addictions - sugar and fat. These are the major cause of Diabetes 2, which is responsible for the biggest percentage increase in our health budget.

Fine, but the answer to this is not to advocate increasing the already huge power of the coercive state, as he goes on to do, but to: a) market me the no doubt healthy products of his company, Just Water International; and b) argue for the privatisation of the health system so that individuals in following their rational self-interest can change their lifestyles, voluntarily, or pay the true cost of not doing so, rather than being relieved of the responsibility for being fatties by socialising the cost of their obesity through the tax system—which as he rightly points out, is leading to an ever-fattening population. (Do you get it yet, Herr Falkenstein?)

Herr Falkenstein, then lurches, as Nazis always do nowadays, for the gun of taxation:

Introducing a tax on [sugar and fat] will not only reduce these addictions, but provide funds to handle the increasing cost of them. The simplest tax to administer is an excise tax on sugar and its related products. Sugar is an addiction, so a gentle weaning off the addiction will make it more manageable for consumers as well as giving manufacturers time to adjust the composition of their products. The excise tax I propose would be 20 per cent on all products with more than 10 per cent sugar content.

Get this straight: tax was only ever conceived, initially—and even then, given the uses it has been put to, wrongly—as a way of funding government activities. Advocating its use, here, to not only change consumer lifestyles but products that are manufactured, in the voluntary free market of interactions between consenting adults, is a step way beyond this into meddling where the State has no place in a civilised society. What I eat is nothing to do with government. Taxes on food to change my food choices are a tax on choice, period. It’s an attack on freedom. My freedom, and the freedom of every other individual. And that’s where the argument ends.

Finally, Herr Falkenstein then shows why the road to our serfdom no longer happens by the blitzkrieg, but by the hubristic Gramscian Godwin on a dumbed-down state-schooled population of:

Last month, Denmark, which has one of the lowest obesity rates (one-third of the New Zealand rate) introduced the world's first fat tax, levied on foods, including butter and bacon, that contain more than 2.3 per cent saturated fat. So, why not a fat tax here?

Why? Because during one of the darkest periods of human history, Poland was the first country to have concentration camps, but that was no reason to replicate the same fascism everywhere else. And Herr Falkenstein’s advocacy of the Big Brother State that meddles in all parts of our lives, including the very food we eat, is the ethic that leads to concentrations camps, not a civilised classical liberal society free of the barbarity of the coercive state and bullies like him who would impose their will over the free will of others.

Thus, because instead of choosing to market his healthy products to me, hoping to win me over voluntarily, Herr Falkenstein decides to go for the iron fist of State to force a lifestyle change via the taxation system, this freedom- loving individual chooses to boycott anything sold by Just Water International—whatever the hell that is. Bugger Busy-Body Tony Falkenstein!

ends

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