Disease du Jour

Now it's obesity. (Before that it was autism and a bunch of other things.) Radley Balko (The Agitator), writing (briefly) in an issue of Time devoted to the proposition that obesity is a public-health crisis deserving of massive government intervention, says this:

The best way to combat the public-health threat of obesity is to remove obesity from the realm of "public health." It's difficult to think of a matter more private and less public than what we choose to put in our bodies. Giv[ing] Americans moral, financial and personal responsibility for their own health, and obesity is no longer a public matter but a private one -- with all the costs, concerns and worries of being overweight borne only by those people who are actually overweight.

Let each of us take full responsibility for our diet and lifestyle. We're likely to make better decisions when someone else isn't paying for the consequences.

As Balko says at the end of his post on this subject: "If you aren't responsible for what you put into your mouth, chew and swallow, what's left that you are you responsible for?"

Nothing, it seems. So let's all get ripped, scarf down some super-size fries, and shoot up the neighborhood. We can always blame it on the fries.