George, concerning your post, I think we are only beginning to plumb the depths of Prof. Popkin’s contributions to our understanding of Cordato’s Law: Using reductio ad absurdum argument against leftists tends to fail. Leftists are not only quicker than you to conceive absurd ends, but also they probably have already reached or surpassed them, rendering your argument moot.
Consider Murphy’s quotation here:
Before continuing, I note with dismay that I am old enough to remember when libertarians and conservatives would object to government interference with tobacco and alcohol by asking, “What next? Will the government start taxing fatty foods and put warning labels on fettuccine alfredo?” I can honestly remember that the proponents of the “serious” regulations dismissed this particularly slippery slope argument as absolutely absurd, that nobody would ever advocate a tax on fatty foods.
[Aside: Not me, though!] And yet now, Barry Popkin at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill defends the taxes on soda by pointing out, “We’ve done it with cigarettes.”
You may recall that Popkin was able to spot the bad news in the fact that Chinese were no longer starving to death by the tens of millions: they’re becoming more obese and “the burden of health care costs is going to go up immensely.”
