Tax Coke? No. Tax Jogging Instead

Running low on ways to bleed older targets of convenience (smokers, drinkers, etc), the U.S. Senate - whose example will doubtlessly be emulated in countless other places during these taxing times - is contemplating a tax on pop and other sugared beverages in order to fund the Obama Administration’s dream of (further) socializing American medicine. This, along with other sin taxes on foods and beverages that are unpopular with people of a certain cast of mind, is being justified upon the spurious grounds that the consumption of these items imposes costs upon all taxpayers through the public financing of health care.

This is wrong in every way.

First of all, I put it to you - and this is well-trodden ground, I know - that the argument that socialized medicine forces us to bear the costs of the irresponsible behavior of some and therefore we should regulate that behavior actually makes the case against socialist health care. Without a free market to regulate and constrain the behavior of individuals we are left with two bad choices. Either we can simply pay for those who choose to be free riders or we can attempt to control their behavior through coercion.

Obviously none of us would opt for the former. However, the latter is injurious to liberty requiring, as it does, odious and progressive regulation of individual choice of the sort that no free people should ever accept. The ability to make “bad” decisions is integral to freedom.

And, of course, the argument of the regulators and socializers assumes that there is some body competent to make objective decisions as to which activities cost the system money and therefore ought to be penalized and which “preventative” ones help to reduce costs and therefore should be subsidized. Assuming there is such a group of people anywhere in the world, I can assure you that they are not in the service of the state.

Thus, in these cases, value judgements are substituted for economic ones. Thus are the things that the regulators and their friends believe to be bad - smoking, drinking, fast food, Coca-Cola - condemned and taxed. There’s a simply rational thought process behind this: these things are “unhealthy” and therefore they are “bad” and therefore they must cost the government money and should thus be taxed. The propaganda to this effect is so pervasive that those who indulge in these vices, for the most part, happily consent to their mugging.

This, as is so often the case where popular and widespread beliefs are concerned, is totally wrong. One simply needs to think it through with cold rationality. Who is likely to cost the state more money: the obese man who drops dead of a sudden and massive heart attack at the age of sixty-four or the jogger who requires knee and hip surgery and who lives to the age of ninety-four, requiring sustained individual care for the last decade of their life? “Duh” is an appropriate answer here.

A recent Dutch study found that, “For healthy 20 year olds, the remaining lifetime health care costs over $400,000, compared with $365,000 for the obese and $321,000 for the smokers.” Those numbers, I think, actually understate the case. The guy who dies at the age of sixty-four never collects a government pension (though I suppose his widow might, depending on the circumstances, collect something - but the cost would nonetheless be massively reduced). He ends up passing his savings on to his children, perhaps freeing them from dependence upon state subsidies in their own age, instead of burning up an accumulated lifetime of wealth in a futile and miserable effort to cheat death.

We’re facing an imminent crisis of public finance. Frankly, my generation can’t afford for most of the Baby Boomers to live into their ninth and tenth decades. We shouldn’t be taxing soda - we should be subsidizing it. The government should be erecting posters encouraging the Baby Boomers to smoke, drink, eat, and generally be merry for the sake of their children. Hell, if we’re going to tax anything, let’s tax jogging - joggers being people whose irresponsible and reckless behavior wears out their bodies, requiring expensive operations to correct, for the selfish purpose of living longer lives during which they will be ever-increasing draws on the treasury. Yeah - let’s tax them.