According to this study thin and healthy people have lifetime health care costs that are nearly 30% higher than smokers, and about 12% higher than fat people. All those costs associated with being unhealthy are outweighed by the fact that people who die younger are cheaper to care for. And that doesn’t include pension costs.
Does this mean that instead of imposing health impact fees on cigarettes and fast food we should now subsidize them, due to their societal benefits? Or perhaps we should impose a tax on juice bars and running shoes?
Of course not. It is none of the government’s business whether you are a health nut or a slob. It wasn’t before when all those nonprofits and government officials were warning about the dire fiscal consequences of our unhealthy behaviors, and it isn’t now that it turns out that being unhealthy is cheaper (at least if you are Dutch). Government shouldn’t be in the business of making lifestyle choices for citizens.
Everything we do has become of legitimate interest to the state. As we have outsourced responsibility for more and more of our basic needs to an ever more powerful nanny state, we have ceded more and more of our freedom.
And as this study shows, our interests are not so clearly in line with government’s. Even if you believed it was in principle a good idea to exchange freedom for security, it turns out that our interests are not always congruent with the State’s. In fact, the State is better off if you die off as your productivity starts to decline. Should the government then shape policy and provide incentives to get your behavior in line with its interests? Of course not.
It’s time to get off the kick that government has any business shaping our individual decisions. Classical liberalism, on which our government is supposed to be based, assumes that governments are instituted among men to protect our lives, our liberty, and our pursuit of happiness. They do not exist to force, cajole, or even nudge us into behaving as some social engineer would like us to.