Sultan Knish has a very perceptive article on why the Left has an obesity obsession.
First of all, a War on Obesity justifies all sorts of micromanagement of the agricultural and food production sectors. Blaming America’s food production sector for a public health problem allows them to play the same game with every company from Kraft to Heinz to General Mills to PepsiCo that they previously have with tobacco companies. To understand why the left would want to do this, you only need to look at the USSR in the past or Venezuela in the present, both of which imposed price controls over food products and tight control over farming. Controlling food production and distribution is essential to controlling the population. This brings us right back to Hydraulic Despotism or the Water Empire. If you can seize control over a major resource that the population needs to survive, you also control the population.
[…]
Secondly, a staple of the left’s exercise of power is to “shame” the public for their abuse of resources. This is common in every Communist countries that run on the illusion of collective economies and constantly berate some group for taking more than “their fair share”.
The Obesity Obsession has that same agenda, to suggest that a group of people are consuming more than their fair share and depriving others of food. Since the left hasn’t managed to reduce American food production to a state of permanent food shortages yet, by “others” they mean other countries. Thinking globally and acting locally to them, means that everyone locally should eat less, so that starving children in Africa will have more. This obviously doesn’t work as anyone with a grain of sense would know, but to the left it’s a moral formula, a bit of pious economic flotsam which insists that Western greed for resources is the reason children are starving in Africa today. (Why children were starving in Africa for the entire history of the continent is a topic best not raised in their presence.)
[…]
Thirdly, the Obesity Obsession is class warfare. In the code of the leftist elite, obese means lower class. If you look at the comedy of the left, being overweight is associated with owning guns and attending church. It’s part of their code for “White Trash” and such codes reveal much more about those who formulate them, than about their targets.
These are but brief excerpts in an article that is worth reading in full.
The Sultan concludes:
America does not have an obesity problem. It has a left wing problem. The problem of the left wing is the age old one of an arrogant self-proclaimed elite that seeks power over the rest of the country for their own benefit. Their Obesity Obsession combines their lust for power over business and individuals, their desire to control the minds of men and their own revealing class arrogance when it comes to those same people they wish to control.
The obesity problem that we do have does not involve food, but government. Specifically liberalism’s over-indulgence in regulatory bodies and bureaucracies to control us. The grossly expanded national budget, the corpulent deficits, the plump departments wallowing in insane budget requests, the greasy pork and oily union giveaways is America’s real obesity problem. And it can only be solved by going on a liberal diet, not a diet in which government spends money liberally, which is what’s on the current administration menu. But a diet in which we cut out the liberalism, and dramatically cut back on the fat. Results guaranteed in 365 days or your money back.
Read the whole article.
BEAR TO THE RIGHT 