One of the iron laws of politics is this: Nothing you get from the state is ever “free”. Either you have paid for it yourself directly in taxes – the old age pension being an example of that – or you pay for it some other way, usually via a loss of freedom.
The best and most insidious example of this might be the provision of healthcare via the taxpayer – a policy with almost universal support that nevertheless comes with the hidden but very real cost of making your personal choices public business. The most extreme recent example of this was during the covid-19 pandemic, when it became acceptable – indeed almost required – to believe that people should be actively punished for their personal choices about their healthcare, either in the form of facemask mandates or regular incidences of wondering aloud on the RTE airwaves about whether the unvaccinated should be publicly flogged, or merely shunned from polite company forever.
This very same dynamic persists even in times when there is no pandemic afoot, as Professor Donal O’Shea helpfully reminded us in the pages of the Irish Times yesterday:
Plain packaging involves removing all branding and standardises the packaging to a uniform colour and design. This would help in reducing the consumption of high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar food and drinks; a critical step if we are to make headway with our obesity problem.
Our health service is under enormous strain because of obesity. One in five Irish children have either overweight or obesity, a problem that will track into adulthood. Childhood obesity is linked to accelerated weight gain in the fourth decade of life, the time when we gain most weight at a population level.
In essence, the argument he is making is that because the state pays for much of the populations’ health treatments, the state therefore has a vested interest in regulating and managing the foods you eat and what your diet is. Because too many people for his liking are fat, he would like a law to severely restrict the advertising of various foods that he blames for the obesity epidemic. It is the classic argument of a statist: For the common good, life must become fractionally less colourful, fractionally less tempting, and fractionally less indulgent. It’s Charlie Haughey’s “we must tighten our belts” speech, but in this case literally rather than figuratively.
There are all kinds of philosophical arguments one could make about the state and obesity, or any other kind of harmful behaviour. Conservatives would agree, for example, that the state should not permit parents to send their teenagers for gender-reassignment surgery on the grounds that it is harmful. There is almost universal support for laws mandating that a driver in a car by his or herself must wear a seatbelt, even though the only life at risk from failure to do so is their own. If the state can regulate harmful behaviour, why can’t it also then regulate the person who eats six take-out pizzas a week, pausing only for a McDonalds on Sunday? That person is harming themselves, you might say, with more certainty than the seatbelt non-wearer.
The problem is, of course, that this same logic can be used almost infinitely to create a safetyist culture where almost no fun or individuality is permitted: Consider the case of a successful athlete who runs and exercises daily in their twenties, but in the process and unbeknownst to themselves damages their knees and hips and other joints to the extent that they need surgery in their forties or fifties. You might think that an extreme example, but there are hundreds of such cases involving men and women involved in sports annually. Does the state not have a vested interest in regulating their behaviour, also?
The biggest problem, of course, is that laws restricting choices and behaviour are politically popular, primarily because there is almost no single choice or behaviour that is universally beloved by the population, and because politics is inherently about dividing people. Thus a Government presents obesity, to cite just one example, as ultimately something that is the fat person down the road costing you and your family money. Or the ice cream van vendor whose livelihood is making the neighbour’s kid’s fat.
The irony here is that the statists who make such arguments also tend to be the people most alert to the very same arguments when used by the dreaded “far right” in the context of the immigration debate, where pointing out that homelessness and immigration might be connected is seen as setting two groups in society against each other. Yet this is what the state does, on an almost daily basis, on subjects like obesity.
It is probably no coincidence, I’d suggest, that the most obese society on the planet – the United States – is also the society where healthcare remains primarily the responsibility of the individual themselves, rather than the Government. When the costs of your treatments are paid for by private insurance providers, doctors and medics tend to become less concerned on balance about societal trends in health that are making them money. In a society where the state pays, your waistline suddenly becomes a matter of public policy.
I make no pretence here to either be on the right or the popular side of this argument – though I would suggest that banning the labelling of Coca Cola, as Dr. O’Shea obliquely suggests in his article, is a measure drastic in its illiberalism and with very little supporting evidence. After all, the obesity epidemic is substantially younger than Coca Cola, and seems to me at face value to have more to do with greater automation in the economy and the increase in sedentary lifestyles than it does with the product itself. Young men working on building sites drinking several cokes per day do not tend to be fat, but executives in offices in their fifties drinking several cokes per day do tend to be fat. Coca Cola is not the obvious problem here.
Professor O’Shea is neither a politician, nor a member of the Government – and indeed has done much good work elsewhere – but his proposal is precisely the kind of thing that dominates the Irish political landscape. It is a problem politicians might feel able to solve because it’s a “you” problem, not a societal problem. They might not be able to fix the health service or deliver housing, but they sure can stop you drinking Coca Cola. The same thing goes for Sinead Ryan over in the Independent, by the way, who yesterday wrote a piece demanding that Sunbeds should be banned because of Skin Cancer.
Note that in every instance, as always, it is the public that is at fault: Too fat. Too tanned. Too sick. Too expensive. If we could just fix the public, we’d have a grand aul’ country.
And in modern Ireland, that is as close as they ever come to solving any major problem.