Venezuela are leading the way in the fight against obesity. While we sit here debating the merits of a sugar tax, they’ve taken real action by making all food hard to find, and it’s really paying off:

According to new results from an annual national survey, nearly three-quarters of respondents reported losing an average of 19 pounds between 2015 and 2016.

…

The survey also found that the portion of respondents who said they ate two or fewer meals increased threefold, climbing from 11.3 percent in 2015 to 32.5 percent in the past year

A truly inspirational example, and one we should all aspire to. Sugar taxes simply don’t go far enough, we need to make all food unobtainable and un-affordable, for your own good. (of course)

(/sarc)

Seriously people, this is socialism at work. This is what it looks like. It’s not the result of US sanctions, it’s not the fault of the CIA, or ‘evil capitalists’ as Venezuelan President Maduro would have you believe. This is the direct, logical, predictable, completely unsurprising consequence of rewarding laziness and punishing productivity.

Here’s my account of what I saw in Venezuela when my wife and I were there a few years ago:

Even middle class people are reduced to dumpster diving in order to eat, as seen in the main image of this post.

Taxing everything, controlling supply, restricting trade, these actions have all contributed to poverty in Venezuela, and any and all new taxes or restrictions will reduce prosperity in Australia too.

But the ‘fight against obesity’ is making headlines again and the drums and hearts of nanny-statists beats for a wealth-reducing sugar tax.

The Australian Government should follow the lead of France, Mexico, the UK, and other countries in developing a policy for taxing and subsiding foods and drinks to improve public health

Oh, ok… you mean the same Mexico which is buying more soft drink than ever, even after the tax was introduced?

Sales of soda are climbing two years after Mexico imposed a roughly 10% tax on sugary drinks—a bright spot for an industry that has feared it could be cast as the next tobacco.

You mean the sugar tax that – when it works – costs more than it makes, and destroys jobs in the process?

It’s one of those basic laws of economics: when you tax something, you get less of it.

Philadelphia is getting a crash course in what that looks like. A little less than two months after the city imposed a new tax on sugary drinks, sales of those beverages are down—way, way down—and revenue collections are too.

It’s hard to have much sympathy for the city, which probably deserves to come up short on the revenue side as punishment for implementing such an obviously misguided policy. Unfortunately, the soda tax is doing more than just wrecking Mayor Jim Kenney’s budget projections—it’s also going to cost some Philadelphia residents their jobs.

One of the city’s largest beverage distributors is planning to cut 20 percent of its workforce, Philly.com reports, and grocery stores across the city are also planning to shed jobs to make up for declining sales. It appears that the tax is causing some shoppers to drive beyond the city’s borders in order to do their grocery shopping (who could have seen that coming, right?).

“In 30 years of business, there’s never been a circumstance in which we’ve ever had a sales decline of any significant amount,” Jeff Brown, chief executive officer of Brown’s Super Stores, told Bloomberg. “I would describe the impact as nothing less than devastating.”

You mean you’re trying stop people from drinking the sugary drinks that [according to a newspaper article by Patrick Hatch today, which I can’t seem to find anywhere online] they’re already turning away from, of their own free will?

Competition in the increasingly crowded bottled water market has forced Coca-Cola Amatil to cut the price of its packaged H2O, which is making up a greater share of sales as Australians turn away from sugary soft drinks.

…

The companies full year results… show Australians continue to turn away from fizzy drinks, with Coke products leading a 4.7% decline in sales.  [Link to be added when I find the article online]

So either the tax doesn’t work (a la Mexico) and the government makes butt loads of cash from the tax, or it does work (a la Philadelphia) and jobs are lost and unemployment rises. And here in Australia people are already making better decisions about what they drink even without the nanny state imposing sin taxes… so where’s the win? Where’s the need?

And of course even if the nanny-statists get their way and a Sugar Tax is introduced, that’s never going to the end of it, there’s already groups organising around the idea that a sugar tax simply doesn’t go far enough:

Why healthy food should be a human right, and how we can get there.

I haven’t the heart to dive too deeply into that website, but all the usual warning bells are there: Appealing to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an excuse to violate everyone’s human rights, a belief in changes at the ‘policy level’ as a way of improving public health, a stated view that it’s not up to individuals and individual choice… all the usual BS.

Here’s the thing; The bureaucrats (as opposed to politicians, who obviously also care about how you vote) do not care about your health, your life expectancy, or anything else to do with you except two things:

1. How much money you give them
2. How much money you cost them

Public health arguments are always debated in dollar terms, ironically by the very same people who insist that capitalism is evil because it reduces everyone down to being an economic unit… Well the Public Health Lobby reduce everyone down to a cost / benefit ratio, and give themselves the power to micro-manage your life in order to improve that ratio.

But here’s why that matters; In the end their policy will be measured by its financial impact first, and any other outcomes will be secondary. This is because governments (including the bureaucrats who run their departments) are addicted to pay increases, budget increases, and the ego and power that come with that.

Think about the taxes on gambling, tobacco, and alcohol… all ‘sin taxes’, which may soon be joined by a sugar tax as well. Do public health bureaucrats really care about reducing your risk of lung cancer, or do they care about the fact that smokers are now paying far more than they cost:

Ladies and gentlemen, thank-you for smoking.

…

Your generosity to the nation’s treasury is truly staggering. The government collects around 8 billion dollars in tobacco excise each year. That’s a lot of cash.

Last year, smokers imposed $318.4 million in net costs on Australia’s healthcare system. Depending on rainfall, smokers also cost the taxpayer about $150 million a year in bushfire control.

If you do even basic arithmetic, these figures disclose that you wonderful, generous smokers pay 17 times as much as you cost.

The same can be said for gambling taxes, alcohol taxes, and the same will be true of any sugar tax. It’s not about cost recovery to pay for their healthcare, it’s about punishment for living in ‘sin’. This is a new Puritanism with a thin veneer of faux concern for your wellbeing. This is about making you live your life in their preferred image, and bleeding you dry if you refuse.

And my final and most important point is this: This will never stop. There is no point at which these people will feel they’ve done enough. They will keep going until we stop them. Till we tell them to piss off and we actually mean it. As I point out in this video:

And if we let them get their way, where will we end up?

Venezuela, that’s where.

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