Deregulate the Lunch Box

A second four-year-old girl at West Hoke Elementary School was told her mother’s lunch was not up to snuff (“Exclusive: 2nd N.C. Mother Says Daughter’s School Lunch Replaced for Not Being Healthy Enough”). 

While packing lunches necessitates government supervision, sex change operations for minors do not (“Sex-changing treatment for kids: It's on the rise”). 

CHICAGO (AP) - A small but growing number of teens and even younger children who think they were born the wrong sex are getting support from parents and from doctors who give them sex-changing treatments, according to reports in the medical journal Pediatrics…

Guidelines from the Endocrine Society endorse transgender hormone treatment but say it should not be given before puberty begins. At that point, the guidelines recommend puberty-blocking drugs until age 16, then lifelong sex-changing hormones with monitoring for potential health risks. Mental health professionals should be involved in the process, the guidelines say. The group's members are doctors who treat hormonal conditions.

Those guidelines, along with YouTube videos by sex-changing teens and other media attention, have helped raise awareness about treatment and led more families to seek help, Spack said.

A sex change operation is more consequential for a child than a bad lunch if the lunch were indeed bad.  If parents are competent to decide a sex change, they are certainly competent to pack a lunch.  It is time that home lunch preparation regained the same deregulated status as sex change operations.

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Germany and the Fat Tax

As a libertarian, I believe that an important role of government is to protect and defend our liberty from private interests who through coercion would wrest our freedom from us.  Too often, those in government act as if they are the proctors of the unwashed masses who are to stupid to act in their own interest or purposely trying to ruin "well crafted" government programs.  (HT Drudge Report)  Hugh Higgins, an AOL contributor writes about efforts by German legislators to pass a tax on obesity in "Germany Weighs Tax on the Obese." 

Marco Wanderwitz, a conservative member of parliament for the German state of Saxony, said it is unfair and unsustainable for the taxpayer to carry the entire cost of treating obesity-related illnesses in the public health system.

"I think that it would be sensible if those who deliberately lead unhealthy lives would be held financially accountable for that," Wanderwitz said, according to Reuters.

Wanderwitz would create a backwards system that provides healthcare to all then capriciously limits care to lessen the cost burden to the state. the state is the master and state objectives supersede individual freedom.  To keep costs low, the government would tax one unhealthy behavior, weight. 

Obesity adds to an individual’s health risk, but what about eating too much salt, riding motorcycles, engaging in unprotected casual sex.  I could go on; exactly half of our activities are more medically costlier than average.  Higgins quotes Jurgen Wasem who makes just this point. 

Health economist Jurgen Wasem called for Germany to tackle the problem of fattening snacks in order to raise money and reduce obesity.

"One should, as with tobacco, tax the purchase of unhealthy consumer goods at a higher rate and partly maintain the health system," Wasem said, according to Germany's English-language newspaper The Local. "That applies to alcohol, chocolate or risky sporting equipment such as hang-gliders."

Wasem taxes get closer to a socially optimal solution if all citizens are homogenous, but they are not, and if one believes that the state has the responsibility to prod, prick and poke citizens to conform to state objectives.  Higgins continues

Walter Willett, a professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, described the idea of a fat tax as "not humane." He told AOL News that lifestyle is not the only factor in obesity, with both genetics and urban environments playing major roles.

"It's not fair to tax somebody just for being obese," Willett said. "Most people who are obese would prefer not to be so."

Assuming that the average citizen knows as much about health risks as government regulators and more about their own risk characteristics, a market system of healthcare better prices all discernable risk.  The government, with the consent of its citizens could still maintain the flexibility of markets by establishing medical savings accounts backed up by a catastrophic insurance policy for all citizens.  While the freedom of individuals to spend their own earnings is violated, at least the violation would minimize the loss of freedom and the cost to the taxpayer. 
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Happy Meal Toys Under Assault by the Fat Police

Freedom is again under assault!  Ken Yeager, the president of the Santa Clara County Board of Superviosrs (CA), proposed a ban on toys in restaurant meals that contain high amounts of some fats, sugars or salt.  The measure passed 3 to 2 last night, a night that will live in fast food infamy.  Read Sharon Bernstein's excellent article ("Happy Meal toys could be banned in Santa Clara County") that was published in the Los Angeles Times for more details. Mr. Yeager describes the logic of banning parents from buying products that their children like.

"People ask why I want to take toys out of the hands of children," said Yeager, who is president of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors. "But we now know that 70% of the kids that are overweight or obese will be overweight or obese as adults. Why would we want to burden anybody with a lifetime of chronic illness?"

"We're responsible for paying for healthcare in the whole county," Yeager said. "We pay close to $2 billion annually on healthcare, and the costs have done nothing but rise." A big part of the increase, he said, is costs related to obesity.

Mr. Yeager, children's weight, other than your own, is none of your business.  Parents know the needs of their children and love them more than you do.  The logic of claiming a right to regulate diet because taxpayers are forced into paying healthcare costs of others is backwards.  The federal government limits taxpayers' freedom by forcing them to pay for the healthcare of others and you top it off by limiting the freedom that people have to buy products from fast food restaurants?  Two wrongs don't make a right.  A better response would be to oppose healthcare reform because it restricts freedom.Taxpayers also fund education.  Does that mean that you should limit the sale of televisions, computers, game systems, software and other products that would conflict with society's goal to educate its citizens?  By the way, limiting access to these products would also give children more time to exercise to fight obesity. 

Your arguments are unconvincing on lesser grounds as well.  According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, only 11% of children ages 2 to 5 were overweight (all data is from 2005 to 2006).  In your effort to take the freedom of parents with overweight children, you are taking the freedom of the majority of parents, approximately 79%, who do not have overweight children.  Sixty seven percent of American adults are overweight.  If 70% of the 11% of children who are overweight will be overweight as adults, then 66% of the 89% of children who are not overweight will also be overweight as adults.  The difference is thin and the problem is with adults, not children. 

Finally, and least of all, you may wish to observe the eating habits of children whose parents buy these meals.  They often open the box, pull out the toy, eat a fry or two and run to the play equipment for lots of good exercise.  They come back with the toy and play with it.  The parents end up eating most of the meal.  That is why the parents are fat and not the children.
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China's Impending Population Bust

I have been on something of a freedom kick over the last couple weeks.  Many articles in the news of public efforts to limit freedom in the name of some social good convinces me to keep writing.  For years, China has attempted to limit Chinese women to one birth through forced abortions, sterilizations and infanticide.  China is now facing a huge projected decline in population.  Alexa Olesen of the AP describes the magnitude of the problem in "Long-hated one-child rule may be eased in China."

A people shortage may seem unlikely in a country of 1.3 billion, the most in the world. The concern, though, is not with the overall number. Rather, as the population shrinks, which is projected to begin in about 15 years, China may find itself with the wrong mix of people: too few young workers to support an aging population.

It is a combination that could slow or, in a worst-case scenario, even reverse China's surging economic growth. The government and families will have to tap savings to care for the elderly, reducing funds for investment and driving up interest rates. At the same time, labor costs probably will rise as the work force shrinks and squeeze out some industries...

Family size has dropped dramatically since the 1970s, when the average Chinese woman had five to six children. Today, China's fertility rate is 1.5 children per woman. Most families have just one, but exceptions allow multiple children for ethnic minorities and a second one for rural families whose first baby is a girl.

If that fertility rate holds, China's population will peak at 1.4 billion in 2026 and then start shrinking, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By the end of this century, China's population would be cut almost in half to 750 million, according to a model developed by Wang Feng, a demographer at the University of California, Irvine. That would still be two and a half times bigger than the U.S. today.

Wang says the government's focus on slowing population growth has dangerous side effects.

In just 10 years, the age 20-24 population is expected to be half of today's 124 million, a shift that could hurt China's economic competitiveness by driving up wages. Over the same period, the proportion of the population over 60 is expected to climb from 12 percent — or 167 million people — to 17 percent.

The one child policy has had a second unintended consequence.  Boys are more valued than girls so parents have aborted female fetuses. 

Another concern is a surplus of males. Sonograms became more widely available in the 1990s, and some parents who wanted a son aborted their baby if they learned it was a girl.

Though the practice is illegal, statistics make clear that it is widespread. The male-female ratio at birth was 119 males to 100 females in 2009, compared with a global average of 107 to 100.

Experts fear that, in the years to come, the gender imbalance will create a frustrated generation of men unable to find spouses. That in turn could fuel the trafficking of women and girls to be sold as brides.

Would the country's citizens be better off if the government had stayed out of Chinese bedrooms and allowing them the freedom to plan their own family size?  Almost certainly yes, but it certainly would have been a freer country.
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Freedom to Joke in East Germany?

(HT Wall Street Journal) I quote from "East German Jokes Collected by West German Spies," written by Hans-Ulrich Stoldt and Klaus Wiegrefe for Spiegel Online.

"Telling jokes was playing with fire," says Kleemann [a former official from the Birthler Authority, which was set up after German unification to manage the archives of the East German secret police, or Stasi]. The Stasi had 91,000 employees and a network of around 189,000 civilian informants to spy on the East German population of 17 million. It regarded every political joke as a potential threat. Anyone who poked fun at the representatives of the organs of state and society was subject to prosecution.

"There were cases of people who were jailed, it was particularly bad in the 1950s and 1960s," says Kleemann.

Here's one example about how that risk was lampooned: "There are people who tell jokes. There are people who collect jokes and tell jokes. And there are people who collect people who tell jokes."...

The other jokes, stripped of commentary are

Did East Germans originate from apes? Impossible. Apes could never have survived on just two bananas a year."

"What would happen if the desert became communist? Nothing for a while, and then there would be a sand shortage."

"Why does West Germany have a higher standard of living than we do? Because communists can't get work permits there."

"A new Trabi [a car made in East Germany] has been launched with two exhaust pipes -- so you can use it as a wheelbarrow."

The Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 spawned a new proverb, for example: If the farmer falls off his tractor, he must be close to a reactor.

Chernobyl, incidentally, wasn't an accident, another joke went. It was just a Soviet program to X-ray its population.

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Leeson and Dean: The Democratic Domino Theory

The Bush administration believed that establishing democracy in Iraq might embolden reformers in other lands seeking to spread freedom.  In remarks to the national Endowment for Democracy at the United States Chamber of Commerce on November 6, 2003, President Bush said

Iraqi democracy will succeed -- and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran -- that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.

Peter Leeson and Andrea Dean refer to the idea that establishing a democratic government in one country increases the probability of neighboring countries adopting more democratic institutions as the democratic domino theory.  They attempted to measure the size of the domino effect in "The Democratic Domino Theory: An Empirical Investigation."  The abstract of the paper reads

According to the democratic domino theory, increases or decreases in democracy in one country spread and “infect” neighboring countries, increasing or decreasing their democracy in turn. Using spatial econometrics and panel data that cover over 130 countries between 1850 and 2000, this article empirically investigates the democratic domino theory. We find that democratic dominoes do in fact fall as the theory contends. However, these dominoes fall significantly “lighter” than the importance of this model suggests. Countries “catch” only about 11% of the increases or decreases in their average geographic neighbors’ increases or decreases in democracy. This finding has potentially important foreign policy implications. The “lightness” with which democratic dominoes fall suggests that even if foreign military intervention aimed at promoting democracy in undemocratic countries succeeds in democratizing these nations, intervention is likely to have only a small effect on democracy in their broader regions.

Like beauty, the "lightness" impact is in the eye of the beholder.  If we are successful at establishing more democratic institutions in Iraq and Afghanistan, is an 11% increase in surrounding countries significant?
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Great New Products

The current financial crisis and economic downturn has caused many to question the wisdom of market based economies. I must point out that, despite the downturn, the goods and services we enjoy are produced by markets. PCWorld lists and describes The 100 Best Products of 2008. Not one was produced by the government. These are of course technology products. There are a great many non-tech innovative products as well. Can anyone name a new government product that is as innovate, useful or fun?

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Required Service?

John Maynard Keynes, an economist who heavily influenced macroeconomic theory famously stated, “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

Not yet defunct, Greg Mankiw (scroll down to Friday, November 7th) singlehandedly changed the policy of the incoming Obama Administration. The Obama Administration was proposing required national service for all middle school, high school and college students. Economists have a long tradition of opposing required or mandated service in part because it force people to work for less than the market wage. Within twenty four hours, the Obama team changed the word “required” to “setting a goal of.” Shortly thereafter, the entire Obama agenda was pulled from the Internet being replaced by a perfunctory promise of change. To be fair, and I don’t like being fair with our elected officials, I believe that the incoming administration was wise to alter policy goals given current economic turmoil. Michele Catalano at PajamasMedia.com disagrees with Dr. Mankiw’s opposition. Please read the postings by following the links in blue and give your opinion on the program. Do you support the idea of required community service, or the less intrusive program of setting a goal and why?

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