Our Betters Speak
Today’s Observer’s editorial is concerned, very concerned…
Only radical action will begin to win the challenge of obesity.
…and swollen with the usual urges:
If the answers, whatever they are, involve challenging corporate power and practices, legislating to improve the content of food or even limiting individuals’ freedom to consume junk, then so be it.
Found via Julia, whose commenter, Katabasis, adds,
One to show people who think “progressive” is synonymous with “freedom.”
We’ve been here before, of course. Readers may recall the Guardian’s unveiling of “passive overeating” and its sympathy with Professor Boyd Swinburn, who wants the state to “intervene more directly” in what and where other people may eat. Apparently, individuals cannot be trusted and the public must be corrected by its betters. Making food more expensive is, we’re told, “a benefit.” As I wrote at the time,
There’s something vaguely unpleasant about a group of richer people – say, left-leaning doctors, columnists and academics – demanding constraints and punitive taxes on proletarian food. Taxes and constraints that would leave themselves largely unaffected. It seems Professor Swinburn believes the population is too stupid to live unsupervised by the state and by extension people much like himself. Our food choices must therefore be taxed or denied and we must be prodded firmly by our betters: “Soft policies such as education programmes… [are] not going to cut the mustard anymore.”
And again, it’s all because they care so very, very much.
‘I’m old enough and working class enough (at least in my origins) to remember a time when to be a bit on the chubby side was seen as a sign of health – meant you had enough food on the table and enough physical reserve to fend off the ravages of illness. Thinnies were seen as a bit unhealthy – possibly in the early stages of consumption and headed for an early grave’.
In the kind of ideal society favoured by a certain type of ‘Guardian’ reader, proles tended not to suffer from over-eating and obesity. The reverse was often true.
‘You won’t find Waitrose’s mature Brie on the list, or Tartiflette, or Pasta, even though you can become just as fat overeating them as you can with burgers, chips and ice cream’.
In the same way that those that condemn cheap flights will not eschew air travel themselves, because whilst the hoi polloi’s flight to Tenerife is bad, the book promotion tours to the USA (Monbiot), trips to one’s pied a terre in Tuscany (Toynbee), or nice foreign holidays in places like the Maldives (Brigstocke) are a completely different matter.
“X should be banned because it’s a drain on the NHS” merely shows that the NHS model is wrong.
”
Yes, the foods to be controlled will just happen to be those that the ‘lower classes’ enjoy. You won’t find Waitrose’s mature Brie on the list, or Tartiflette, or Pasta, even though you can become just as fat overeating them as you can with burgers, chips and ice cream.
”
Hi Rob,
That’s an interesting point – I’ve noticed that we have our own discussion here in Norway paralleling what I’ve seen in the US about ‘pink slime’ – a process to increase the amount of foodstuffs that can extracted from an animal carcass. This is seen as bad.
Similarly, we’re subsidizing ‘ecological’ farming, and have instituted minimum-quotas for less-efficient production.
Both of these strategies are of course driving food prices up, with little obvious benefit to those who already are stretching their money to pay for foods.
My own theory, is that in this round of forced egalitarianism, it’s not the elite products that are being banned – the elite can and will pay for black-market goods – but rather the staples of the poor. We shall all be equal, and we’ll be healthy and environmentally conscious.
Or, to quote a recent political figure, Let them eat Roquefort.
Personally, I’d prefer to be able to choose – even if I risk making the wrong choices.
Yours,
-S
I don’t know if I’ve posted it here before (a quick google search indicated not), but the short story, _Lipidleggin’_ is apposite and quite entertaining, in a gallows-humor sort of way. It can be read online at: http://billstclair.com/DoingFreedom/000623/df.0600.fa.lipidleggin.html
And what comment on the nanny state would be complete without everyone’s (or at least *my*) favorite C.S. Lewis quote?
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
“Nudge” in physical form.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9714820.stm
Apparently the Hungarian government are ahead of the curve on this…
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/04/24/hungary-deprives-diabetics-treatment-punishment_n_1449036.html?icid=maing-grid7|uk|dl5|sec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D105797
“Taxpayers’ money should not be spent on patients who don’t cooperate with their doctor,”
For Authoritarians the beauty of socialised medicine is that (a) the patient is robbed of the cost long before treatment and (b) the State has an effective monopoly of treatment. Thus patients must ‘co-operate’ with the doctor (i.e. obey unconditionally, regardless of circumstance) or be denied treatment they are entitled to.
In a system closer to a true provision of service, if a doctor withdrew treatment the patient could go to another.
My biggest objection to socialised medecine is this aspect that because your ill health becomes a cost to the taxpayer rather than directly to yourself, the state then feels it has the right to dictate to you the minutea of how you live your life under pain of withdrawal of healthcare. We have seen the effects of this again and again with authoritarians demanding that we smoke less, eat a certain way, excercise more etc. etc.
Its not like we even get good value for the money we are taxed to pay for it. If you divide the annual budget of the NHS by the UK population it comes out at about £160 pppm for a crap service. As a middle aged man (and so not at the cheap end of the curve) I can get excellent private healthcare for about £50 pm, be seen by a doctor on demand in minutes rather than hours, get an appointment for a procedure in weeks rather than months. Yet I still have to pay taxes to cover a crap service that I do not avail of.
I’m all for ensuring that the poor should not forego healthcare for lack of funds and am willing to contribute to that with my taxes, but surely if we made it an expectation that people pay for their own healthcare automatically out of their paycheck, then the number who would lack cover due to poverty would be a tiny fraction of the population and thus the annual amount paid by the taxpayer to cover the poor would be a tiny fraction of the current budget. Far better to subsidise the genuinely poor to pay for private healthcare than create a public behemoth that cares nothing for us because we have no choice. It’s monopoly, as always, that kills good service.
I currently live, work and pay taxes in Spain and when I was shopping for private healthcare, I had dozens of companies to choose from with prices starting at around €50pm for bog standard cover to €120pm for Rolls Royce cover, still far less than my share of taxes to pay for the public system which I pay for but do not use. The public system has perfectly good and professional doctors and nurses and a good standard of care. What I pay extra for is to slash my waiting times for any service by 80%. Like all ‘free’ services, rationing needs to be made somehow, and in the public system rationing is by way of waiting list.
I’ve just checked my policy and I actually pay €150pm for my health insurance, but it was the very best cover I could find, I doubt you could find better here. Still less than the £160pm I would be contributing in taxes for my share of the NHS were I still living in the UK. I should clarify that the quality of care is very high in the public health system here in Spain. My worry was, that if I were to get a critical illness, I know that with my Rolls Royce private cover, I would get get every procedure I needed in a fifth of the time it would take in the public system and I would never have to argue my case with any beaurocrat with my imperfect Spanish. In a critical health issue, those months of waiting would make the difference between life and death.
I had a health issue recently that needed me to visit A&E. The nearest hospital was the public one. When I walked into the waiting room my heart dropped. There were at least 200 people waiting and the reception nurse told me it would take at least 4 hours for me to be seen. I jumped back in my car and drove ten minutes further to the private hospital. I was in front of a doctor 5 minutes after walking through the door. I won’t make that mistake again. I now pay my premium every month with pleasure.