‘C’ is for Corpulence, Governmental and Otherwise

by Eileen McGuire-Mahony | 7:16 pm, February 10, 2010 | Comments Off

If there’s one thing you can say to justify anything, it’s, “But, it’s for the children“.

This covers a lot of ground, and our elected leaders have made hay with it for a long time.  Whiny soft-socialists want to micromanage our money for us, including yelling at us for dipping into our own piggy banks.  Cranky fundamentalists want to sneak into our bedroom, take notes, and tell us to stop doing all the fun stuff.  But that’s all old evil, though it is worth noting that two, seemingly irreconcilable, contingents can agree on penalizing early withdrawals.

As of yesterday morning, big government will be muscling its way into our kitchens and swinging its portly gut around the butler’s pantry, making sure we smile as we eat our soy oil and bean curd cookies.

This comes to us courtesy of one Michelle Obama, who received precisely the same number of votes in 2008 as yours truly.  And may it please heaven that I never have another thing in common with that woman.

Anyways, Shelly-Belly is going to solve the ‘problem’ of obesity in America today, much as her husband has so deftly handled the economy.  The requisite spending and growth of government is needed to communicate such subtle and only recently made discoveries as the dangers of excessive junk food and soda consumption, the need to control how much children eat, and the advisability of physical activity.

To come up with other stunning facts, her squeeze-in-chief, Barry, has signed a presidential memorandum.  This frivolous excuse for a press conference will create (wait for it) a committee, which will study the problems for the next three months and make recommendations.

Oh, and we’re now spending $400 million a year to bribe convenience stores to carry health food that no one will buy fund a ‘Healthy Food Financing Option’ to encourage neighborhood stores to carry healthier food options.

Plus an itty-bitty bit of a $10 billion tax to ‘update’ the Childhood Nutrition Act.

The usual bromides got thrown around as this plan, which is little more than a way to divert our bored and arrogant First Lady with our money, got rolled out.  There will be redesigned food packaging, a new look to the food pyramid, celebrities encouraging healthy lifestyles (whether in between rehab stints or via closed feed from detox has not yet been ironed out), programs to put more grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods…

Fine, let’s get to brass tacks.  Mrs. Obama actually got something right when she said, “We have everything we need, right now, to help our kids lead healthy lives’.  However, I suspect she meant ‘We’ as a reference to the federal government and the coterie of self-proclaimed reformers who orbit around D.C.

Managing weight is not a mystery.  Burn more calories than you consume.  We all know, and have known for some time, about exercise and adequate sleep and lots of water and minimizing high fat and highly processed food, etc., etc., etc.  In most things that end up hurting us, we know better.  Don’t smoke, wear sunscreen, wear your seat belt, save 15% of your income, take your studies seriously, and so on.  The problem used to be one of people choosing immediate gratification over delayed, but larger, gratification – what an economist would call an instance of discounting the future.

These days, there’s a far bigger problem going on; the entire cultural shift to believing that all of what was once responsibility is now someone else’s job.  Combined with a government that is far too willing to be our savior in return for money, power, and our privacy, we’re in trouble.  You could say that the worst of government is simply the worst of ourselves, aggregated, spun, processed and then visited upon us, funded by our own work.

Nothing in Obama’s plan adds new knowledge or value to solving the problem that Americans are getting chunkier.  More likely, it’s part of vastly overstating the problem because crisis sells in the Beltway.  From drive-throughs with dollar menus to white-cloth restaurants, from bulk food warehouses to specialized gourmet emporiums, healthy food is not in short supply.  And neither is greasy comfort food.  This is the market function; it responds to what people want, not that what Michelle Obama and her acolytes think we should want.

Nor is nutritional information a dear commodity.  We have a good idea of what is a heart attack waiting to happen and can easily access the precise details if we like.  This is, after all, the age of the Web and the smart phone.  But we choose not to because we don’t want to know the details of our bad behavior.  Ignoring the ‘one cookies is 45% of your daily allowance of fat’ warning is no more effective then squeezing your eyes shut to get rid of horror movie monsters.   But, what’s more, some bureaucrat driven ploy to force the calorie count in front of us is going to play out like A Clockwork Orange.  Fine, condition us and make us look at it.  The Obamas may have us taking sworn oaths at the cash register that we have read and understand the amount of Vitamin A before we can proceed home, but we’ll ignore it anyway and go merrily on our way.

Human beings are going to do what they want to do and the most clever government plan will fail if it clashes with human nature.

At any rate, Michelle Obama’s phony-smelling story of her own awakening to this health crisis raises alarms – or ought to.  To hear tell, her daughters were both getting worryingly porcine on a diet of fast food and sugary drinks, something this Princeton and Harvard educated lawyer cum executive failed to notice until the pediatrician took her aside.  A woman who doesn’t even notice when her own children are porking out to the point that medical intervention is warranted is the one to tell all 300 million of us how to slim down?  Will this be achieved in tandem with her effort to help working mothers balance their schedules?

Last I heard, this is the First Lady who works a two day week yet still has no time to accompany the Secret Service as they ferry her children to and from school, who is so swamped with this punishing schedule that the entire White House staff is insufficient to help out and she needed to drag her mother along.  In short, Michelle Obama hardly strikes me as a woman who knows what she’s talking about.  Nor do I think she has the humility to listen to anyone who does.  Imagine a middle class woman without a single live-in staffer to her name telling glamorous Mrs. O. how to handle the real world.

Rather, she belongs to set for whom neither time nor money is never a factor is making it all work, and, astonishingly for a woman not born into the jet set, she lacks (or has long since lost) the imagination to give her some understanding of families for whom such things are a perpetual battle.  Don’t let the attractive slogans of her speech writers fool you.  The ‘Let’s Move’ initiative is yet another attempt at something that doesn’t work.  But throwing money at a problem when it’s obvious something more is needed works for two reasons.  It makes it look like our government shepherds are doing something and it perpetuates the problem that gives them an excuse for taking more and more from citizens.

Comments

Praise for PPC From Our Lefty "Fan"

• "Zany-ass bombast-entertainment...Hackneyed weirdo communist pseudo-nostalgia" --Alan Franklin, ProgressNow

Featured Posts

• Rising Oil Production in Alberta: More Evidence Disproving Hubbert’s Peak

  In today’s environment it’s hard to find good news. But this is good news: the free market is working, and putting statists’ predictions, like Hubbert’s, to shame. Oh, the joy!

• Regulatory Agencies Continue to Slow the Economy
• Printing Money Doesn’t Work in Britain Either
• Oklahoma’s Constitutional Amendment Would Pit Taxpayers Against Unions
• Friday’s Unemployment Numbers: Correcting the Corrections
• Romney Woos Grand Junction, Earns Sen. King’s Endorsement
• The Borking of Netflix: movie service finds privacy law to be an inconvenience