Obese Government, and Other Fashionable Ideas

Hillsdale at dusk.

Hillsdale at dusk.

I’m just back from two long days getting back and forth from that great oasis of sanity, Hillsdale College, Michigan.  I was there for a conference on energy, and my lecture was entitled “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Global Warming.”  A video will be available in the fullness of time, and I’ll post it here.

And what do I find in the news upon my return?  Al Gore has tweeted out that what the nation needs now is a good five-cent cigar a food policy.  (See the facsimile of the tweet below if you don’t believe it.)

So I guess having failed to regulate hydrocarbons, Gore now wants to regulate carbohydrates.  As with energy consumption, has Gore thought of, um. . . leading by example?

Gore Food Policy copy

So what’s in this brilliant essay that has Gore going all low carb(on) diet on us?

Yet we have no food policy — no plan or agreed-upon principles — for managing American agriculture or the food system as a whole.

That must change.

There it is, in cold pixels: the unctuous dismay of a lack of a policy combined with the imperative mood that this must change.  Food is the next tobacco.  Talk of higher taxes on fat and sugar has been around for a while, and I expect we’re going to see this ramped up in the future.

Here’s my agreed-upon principle for managing food: you can have my doughnut and fried drumstick when you pry out out of my cold dead left hand, but you better pry my firearm out of my cold dead right hand first.

The irony is so obvious it hardly needs pointing out: if anything should have a calorie-regulated diet, it is our morbidly obese government.

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