Doesn’t the government need to keep foolish people from eating the wrong kinds of food? Some people want the government to become active, while others say, “Mind your own business.”

Here’s a letter from someone in the latter camp (Don Boudreaux of GMU) to someone in the former (Barry Popkin of UNC):

Prof. Barry Popkin
Department of Nutrition
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27516-2524

Dear Prof. Popkin:

A segment on WJLA-TV’s 11:00pm newscast yesterday featured you endorsing a tax
on pizza. You justified such a tax on grounds that Americans today eat too much
“junk food.”

Believing Americans to be too dimwitted or lacking in self-control to choose for
themselves what to eat, you obviously also believe that college professors
possess the moral authority to propose that government dictate the contents of
other people’s diets.

So the rules of civil society, as you see them, are apparently these: If
Professor divines that Person isn’t acting in Person’s own best interests,
government should obstruct Person’s efforts to live as he wishes and prod Person
to live instead according to how Professor wants Person to live.

I can play by these rules, too.

I propose that all articles and books advocating that government intrude into
our private choices be taxed at very high rates. Socially irresponsible
producers of such “junk” scholarship churn out far too much of it. As a result,
unsuspecting Americans’ consume harmfully large quantities of this scholarship –
scholarship made appealing only because its producers cram it with sweet
expressions of noble goals. These empty intellectual ‘calories’ trick our
brains – which, after all, evolved in an environment that lacked today’s
superabundant access to junk scholarship – into craving larger and larger, even
super-sized, portions of such junk.

The tax I propose would reduce Americans’ consumption of mentally debilitating,
university-processed nonsense that serves only to empower its producers while it
makes the rest of us intellectually flabby and clogs our neural pathways with
notions that endanger not only each individual who reads it but, also, the
entire body-politic.

As a nation, we have a duty to prevent our fellow citizens from mindlessly
ruining their minds – for when any one mind is damaged by the consumption of
junk scholarship, the rest of us are harmed by the resulting obesity of the
state.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University