It's up to individuals to make decisions about what they do and do not eat and live with the consequences.
True, but when that level of individual freedom has negative repercussions on the community, the government has to step in. Else the society will cease to be.
Imagine if our (USA) govt allowed us to buy gas (fuel, petrol) with lead in it, ignoring the long term impact of lead in the environment.
Individual freedom is not absolute. An one should not be allowed to engage in habits that harms the community in that fashion. Yes, there are things we can't avoid, but when necessary, the govt has the powers to regulate individual habits.
Unfortunately for these countries, membership in the WTO does not serve their interests in this regard.
There's a significant distinction between polluting the environment, which harms other people directly and making unhealthy decisions in one's own life, which has only indirect effects on others.
In countries that provide publicly-funded healthcare you are arguably directly effecting other people's lives by the cost of the medical treatments you'll end up needing if you are obese - these treatments will be funded out of the taxpayer's pocket, when that money could be going to better schooling, infrastructure, or some other use.
Likewise, if an individual makes a choice that causes his or her taxable income to decrease, he or she has arguably (by the same argument) directly effected other people's lives by reducing the tax revenue of the country.
Ought governments impose some incentive for individuals to earn as much taxable income as possible?
So was the parent comment. They could just help themselves to whatever they needed if the law didn't stop them. Poverty is legally enforced on people that don't earn enough.
We could certainly have arguments about the allocation of natural resources and the merits of propertarian vs. antipropertarian societies, and I've done and enjoyed a lot of that, but it's out of the scope of this particular argument. In this context, the fact that government will punish a person for taking what is considered the property of another person is not in the same class as a fine or imprisonment for choosing to reduce one's taxable income.
This is also true with privately-funded health care based on insurance with shared risk pools that don't take behavioral risk factors in to account. It's the very definition of a moral hazard.
But if you accept that argument, where is the line? What personal decisions, if any shouldn't be subject to regulation?
True, but I was arguing that poor personal health choices are not only an indirect negative effect on other people, which is what you said. And I neglected obvious direct negative effects it can have on people close to you, such as children who now have to care for a parent who loses their leg due to diabetes, or who don't get to experience play because of a parent who's so obese and unfit that they can barely walk around without wheezing.
Edit: I can't give you a list of personal decisions that I think should be subject to regulation, because it's not as simple as that, and there's a debate to be had for each one, and that will depend on circumstances and ideology. But I do think that in this case it's reasonable, since the cost of treating diabetes patients is crippling a small, poor country.
That seems like the logical conclusion. Where's the dividing line between what the government should and shouldn't regulate, if they judge it to be in the best interests of the people (and the government's will being theoretically derived from the collective will of the governed)?
The government's will being theoretically derived from the collective will of the governed should not be used as a blanket appeal to authority. The people probably do not like all of their private communication being spied on by the NSA. That we've not yet elected officials and given them the power to stop such spying doesn't mean it's acceptable.
Moving on, the people should by default be free to make decisions that are not in their best interests. Just because you can't control yourself from eating candy doesn't mean my Right to Candy should be taken away as well.
Taking away liberty must be very, very carefully considered. What is the harm being prevented? What price is being paid to remove it? Seatbelts are a low cost to implement, a low cost to wear, and offer a high return of value in lives and health saved.
Banning imported food at tourist established is a much less obvious win. If I can't indulge in a sugary treat on vacation then when can I? That sounds like something the local agriculture industry is lobbying for more than anything. Who benefits the most from this change? Follow the money and I bet (heh) you'll find the big winners aren't the obese population.
> Taking away liberty must be very, very carefully considered
I agree, and it's possible that this move has been very carefully considered. The obesity levels are catastrophic, and the trend has been clear for years (maybe decades), so it's quite possible that this move has been considered for some time before finally being implemented. There's no reason not to give the benefit of the doubt here.
I'd also add that any move to take away liberty needs to be reviewed at some point. Otherwise the tendency is for more and more regulation. Then typically the only way things get changed is by major lobbying efforts, which can takes years or decades, or when a negative effect on society has become such a problem that it's no longer possible to ignore it. In the meantime, a lot of people have had their lives impacted.
> Banning imported food at tourist established is a much less obvious win
Yeah, though maybe that part is related to the "effort to promote local agriculture" that's also mentioned in the article. It still seems like something that would have little actual impact - it's hard to believe that tourists are coming and only eating junk food, and not any food that's locally grown. No-one goes on holiday and eats only Pringles.
Or maybe it's about perceived fairness - staff at tourist resorts have access to foods that the rest of the population can't buy, so they remove that access to put everyone on the same level.
A fat slob overflowing the seat next to me on an aeroplane has a direct effect on me and I would be perfectly happy for measures to be taken to mitigate it.
Or we could get rid of anti-discrimination laws and allow airlines to charge based on weight/have assigned seating types. But I imagine that wouldn't go over very well with the people who want to ban junk food.
Most airlines in the US have an official policy allowing them to require passengers who cannot sit in a single seat with the armrests lowered and seatbelt fastened to pay for an additional seat. They usually try to employ alternatives, but on full flights, people do get bumped if they don't fit in one seat.
Those are arbitrary "principles" that only make sense in the context of a given arbitrary political ideology.
I want to live in a country where it's easy to be lean, so that as many people as possible are lean, because there are no downsides to being lean, and infinite upsides.
Paying in relation to what you use seems fair. Sending small packages costs less than big heavy packages. What's a few bucks' difference anyway?
Unfortunately, it has been pursued as though it is, which is a natural progression of the 'slippery slope' argument. For example, there was the relatively high profile Hooters weight discrimination lawsuit which was allowed to proceed and settled for an undisclosed amount, even though there was no legal basis of wrongdoing.
There's the scale of economics. If only few people buy healthy food, supermarkets have no incentive to offer it at all. Even if they offer healthy food, the price is higher because they can't buy in bulk or else they waste much of it.
> If only few people buy healthy food, supermarkets have no incentive to offer it at all.
Then how come most grocery stores have healthy food?
If it truly was a minority group that wanted to eat healthy food, what right do they have to force the majority to buy what they want to make it more economical? Although the premise is flawed, because the real reason 'healthy food' is expensive is because the foods considered healthy inherently cannot use many methods that increase yield like pesticides. And then some go so far as to claim GMO's are unhealthy/cannot be organic, further driving up the prices of foods that get to wear the healthy food labels. Increasing demand for healthy food would make it more expensive, certainly in the short term.
> Then how come most grocery stores have healthy food?
All over America there are many areas known as "food deserts" because stores do not stock fresh foods and produce. In those areas the only food readily available is shelf-stable, highly processed, very high caloric density junk food.
Now think about being on a Pacific island where leaving your food desert is not just a matter of a long drive or bus ride down the road to a different community.
Wow I just had a thought. Imagine if the WTO had been around when countries started banning the sale of Tetraethyllead.
The TEL industry fought very hard against such action first by attacking the science, then fighting in courts and political arenas. Imagine if they had access to a super-national court explicitly created as a way for large corporations to punish governments for creating laws that are bad for their business?
> True, but when that level of individual freedom has negative repercussions on the community, the government has to step in
Good, then I guess the government should tell everyone to exercise too? I mean, people not exercising has negative repercussions on the community, so the government has to step in. Mandatory exercise for everyone.
I guess the same logic applies to limiting gaming/Internet time too.
Mandatory exercise is certainly consistent with banning unhealthy food, but I wonder why (presumably) very few people who advocate the latter would advocate the former. My guess is that the enforcement mechanisms feel different on the surface, because forced exercise requires physical force (or fines, etc.) on each individual, while banning junk food requires force on manufacturers and/or retailers (I'm not sure the distinction is very clear, since these entities are comprised of individuals). Yet that doesn't feel like a sufficient explanation, since many people advocate the prohibition of certain drugs, which does require the use of force against individuals.
> Imagine if our (USA) govt allowed us to buy gas (fuel, petrol) with lead in it, ignoring the long term impact of lead in the environment.
Lead has a quantifiable effect that directly infringes on the rights of others -- eating junk food does not. You cannot say that my choice to get fat infringes on anyone's freedoms more than you are infringing on my freedom by preventing me from eating what I choose. It's not a characteristic of a free society. Pure democracy is mob rule. We might as well ban gay marriage, too, because there are more people who don't like it and claim it infringes on their rights than there are people who want to get gay marriages (see how that can be twisted the other way?)
Under Obamacare, their increased health care costs also costs everyone (in part because Obamacare is the worst of all worlds -- it would be difficult to intentionally design something worse).
As someone who was uninsurable before Obamacare, no, it is not the worst of all worlds.
The worst of all worlds is when an otherwise-healthy 37 year old can't buy insurance because he had his gallbladder out in his early 20s. Which is what we had before obamacare.
I worked in insurance for over five years. "Universal insurance" is the worst possible way to try to make sure all citizens have access to medical care. There are other proven systems that are vastly better.
As I understand it: Good ideas come from individuals. Good sorting of ideas comes from a crowd. Trying to get a crowd to make good ideas is apparently not very functional.
True, but when that level of individual freedom has negative repercussions on the community, the government has to step in. Else the society will cease to be.
Imagine if our (USA) govt allowed us to buy gas (fuel, petrol) with lead in it, ignoring the long term impact of lead in the environment.
Individual freedom is not absolute. An one should not be allowed to engage in habits that harms the community in that fashion. Yes, there are things we can't avoid, but when necessary, the govt has the powers to regulate individual habits.
Unfortunately for these countries, membership in the WTO does not serve their interests in this regard.