Adam Smith Institute

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At some point we really do need to tell certain politicians to just toddle off

And that point may have been reached for one of them:

“Supersized” food and drinks should be banned by law in a bid to combat Britain’s obesity epidemic, the new head of the Commons health select committee has said.

What? We're going to have a law now where a willing purchaser cannot negotiate with a willing supplier to gain 600 calories in return for folding money instead of 400 calories for a smaller amount?

What?

Dr Sarah Wollaston, a Conservative MP and former GP, said the state had a “duty to intervene” to protect current and future generations from unhealthy habits threatening to shorten their lives.

This sort of proposed lawmaking does not bode well for the efficacy of open primaries, does it?

The former GP called for a direct ban on “supersized” foods and drinks, so that manufacturers would be restricted to producing chocolate bars, junk food meals and fizzy drinks in standard sizes.

She said: “Why aren’t we taking more direct steps around supersizing? You go into the cinema and someone will ask if you want to supersize for an extra 20p - we don’t need that.”

Here's how things work in a free and liberal society: you don't get to decide what we would like to have. We get to decide what we would like to have. And if we want more chopped gristle for a paltry extra sum of money then we are and should be perfectly at liberty to have that. As are people to be allowed to sell that to us.

That moral point being entirely aside from the practical issues of course. For we're not all entirely stupid and if we want more than the Wollaston Burger we'll order two.

And there's an interesting legal point here as well. Clearly she thinks that we're all too damn stupid to be allowed to decide what to put into our own bodies. Despite their being, you know, ours? OK, so she obviously does think that. But she's an elected politician: one, clearly, elected by people too stupid to know what they'd like to eat. At which point she's not really got all that much authority, does she?

Either she's right and we're all morons and thus she should have no power having been elected by said morons or we're not morons and so she has a moral claim to power. But if we're not morons then banning us from eating a handful of extra french fries isn't necessary, is it?

Perhaps the best we can hope for is that Dr. Wollaston disappears in a puff of of her own self-contradictory logic as with some of Oolon Colluphid's philosophical creations. but lord forbid that she ever gets to write the law for this country.