The fat tax fallacy

James Cracknell, the athlete turned anti-obesity campaigner, was the subject of sniggering and derision in April when he said that North Korea and Cuba had got a ‘handle on obesity’. With impressive understatement, he attributed this to both countries being ‘quite controlling on behavioural trends’. It was a bad point poorly made, but in a roundabout way he drew attention to the major obstacles faced by those who want to reduce obesity rates in the rest of the world: freedom and affluence.

Only Venezuela was missing from his list. Its people lost an average of 19 pounds last year as its basket-case economy unravelled, but this only serves to underline the point. Even the most fanatical nanny statist would hesitate before endorsing grinding poverty as a weight-loss strategy — and yet it is the only thing that seems to work. In the free world, obesity rates are flat or rising, and nowhere are they falling.

This, we are told, means that obesity is an ‘epidemic’, despite the fact that it is neither infectious nor a disease. Obesity rates in Britain have barely risen in a decade. Rhetoric about it being an ‘epidemic’ is designed to make people think that government coercion is appropriate when it is not, and to foster the idea that the private matter of being fat is an issue of ‘public health’.

Paternalists leave no stone unturned in their efforts to make other people’s business their own. Economic research shows that the impact of obesity on government finances is either trivial or cost-saving, but this does not stop campaigners making the ludicrous claim that it will bankrupt the NHS. If the health service ever declares bankruptcy — a virtual impossibility when it is owned by the state — it will be because people are living too long, not dying too soon.