Machan's Musings - How To Ruin Thanksgiving
by Tibor R. Machan
Yes, I am overweight by enough to make an issue of it. My children diligently do this every time we get together, mostly good-naturedly but not without a measure of seriousness. People who are overweight are, after all, at higher risk than those who manage to keep themselves slim and fit. Not everyone by any means but most. That’s what statistics show and I for one believe in them.
What is most silly, however, is to go around during Thanksgiving Week fretting about weight gain just about the time when you’re about to sit down and gorge yourself on the most delicious food someone near and dear to you has cooked up with loving care. Yet that is just what some of my friends have done who have generously invited me to be one of their several guests this last Thanksgiving. All in good fun, of course—I’ve known these friends for over 40 years and we have a history of joshing and kidding and needling and prodding and such.
In recent years the weight issue has come up more than once and we are all a bit guilty of paying less heed to it than we should, in part because we all manage to appear reasonably presentable despite the extra pounds. No huge gut, no pot belly, no problem with getting clothes off the rack, getting into coach seats on airplanes, etc..
But, some of us seem to be inordinately determined to raise the matter of our extra pounds at times when it really is just silly to do so, namely, right around the time when eating is clearly the order of the day. I swear—this good friend of mine would go around providing some of the most sumptuous dishes, servings of one, two, or three, all the while chattering away about how much someone with such and such height and age "ought to weigh." As if he had an obsession with making all of us feel badly about the weight problem even while making certain we will continue to have it! What fun—ruining Thanksgiving dinner while serving it!
All of this is to point up the even greater silliness of those in our society who want to blame every human malady on some big corporation, when, in fact, most people are perfectly aware of their own risky behavior. For example, I know quite well that losing a few pounds each month would very likely do me a world of good. Indeed, I embark on this effort periodically and often even succeed, until I realize that I do like to eat well and unless I get that call from Hollywood about this upcoming role in a James Bond movie, one that requires me to be much thinner than I am, I will probably assume the risk of being overweight however much the experts and meddlers want me to change my ways.
An aspect of the free society, the one that does the most respect to our nature as moral agents who need to choose on our own to do the right thing and can fail in this task, is that people aren’t treated as children by their legal authorities. It isn’t their job to make us live right, only to protect our rights to our liberties. That’s their task, not to become the weight or smoke or fitness police. So, despite the fact that these folks in government and the various panic-ridden think tanks or institutes care about how the rest of us fare in our lives when it comes to our health and welfare, they need to keep it all to making suggestions, giving us information, at most, not to regiment us as if they were our parents.
Of course, to this it will be replied that the cost of medical malfeasance is borne by "society," that is, by other people, mainly because of the government having gotten so heavily involved in providing for our welfare. Medicare and all the other legally mandated health support systems are carrying much of the burden stemming from our mismanagement of such matters as our weight.
And that is true enough, just as the anti-smoking fascists made clear and so managed to persuade everyone that they should sock it to the tobacco companies good and hard. Yet this is a spurious argument. We are told, on the one hand, that we have "a right to health care." But then it turns out this isn’t really a right at all but a highly loaded perk bestowed on us by people who want to attach strong strings. What strings? Well, we have to live the way they want us to.
A right, properly understood, has no such strings. You have the right to freedom of religion and no public authority may lay down various criteria about how you must exercise that right. Or freedom of speech. A right is a region of liberty and you get to say what you do within that region. But with such "rights" as healthcare that region is severely restricted by a bunch of bureaucrats—you get to exercise your "right" provided you behave as the bureaucrats say you must.
In any case, all of this is very interesting but, please, don’t bring it all up at the Thanksgiving table. We know it, yes we do, but we choose to defy it, period. Especially during the holidays.
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