David Boaz

A headline in the Washington Post blares:

Japan’s New Public Health Problem Is Getting Big

Obesity Has Grown, Along With Appetite For Western Foods

But no. Obesity is not a public health problem. It is apparently becoming more widespread in Japan, though still much less so than in the United States, but it remains an individual and non-contagious problem.

The meaning of “public health” has sprawled out lazily over the decades. Once, it referred to the project of securing health benefits that were public: clean water, improved sanitation, and the control of epidemics through treatment, quarantine, and immunization. Public health officials worked to drain swamps that might breed mosquitoes and thus spread malaria. They strove to ensure that water supplies were not contaminated with cholera, typhoid, or other diseases. The U.S. Public Health Service began as the Marine Hospital Service, and one of its primary functions was ensuring that sailors didn’t expose domestic populations to new and virulent illnesses from overseas.

Those were legitimate public health issues because they involved consumption of a collective good (air or water) and/or the communication of disease to parties who had not consented to put themselves at risk. It is difficult for individuals to protect themselves against illnesses found in air, water, or food. A breeding ground for disease-carrying insects poses a risk to entire communities.

The recent concern over a tuberculosis patient on an airplane raises public-health issues. You might unknowingly find yourself in an enclosed space with a TB carrier. But nobody accidentally ingests a Big Mac. And your Big Mac doesn’t make me fat. That’s why obesity is not a public health issue, even if it’s a widespread health problem. As I wrote before,

Language matters. Calling something a “public health problem” suggests that it is different from a personal health problem in ways that demand collective action. And while it doesn’t strictly follow, either in principle or historically, that “collective action” must be state action, that distinction is easily elided in the face of a “public health crisis.” If smoking and obesity are called public health problems, then it seems that we need a public health bureaucracy to solve them — and the Public Health Service and all its sister agencies don’t get to close up shop with the satisfaction of a job well done. So let’s start using honest language: Smoking and obesity are health problems. In fact, they are widespread health problems. But they are not public health problems.

A few weeks ago I noted that the $3.3 billion county budget in one of Washington’s wealthy suburbs, Fairfax County, had a bit of fat in it, such as manners classes for kids. This weekend the Washington Post reported that ”a $2 million [swimming pool] renovation [in neighboring Arlington County], dedicated yesterday, is part of the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority’s effort to woo residents from the increasing number of pools run by homeowners associations, officials said.”

Maybe if the private sector is providing a service, taxpayers could be relieved of that burden. If the argument is that government-run pools are intended to serve poor children who don’t have access to private pools, we could debate that policy. But the Post article makes clear that Northern Virginia government officials see themselves as competing in a “market” to attract customers from the pools provided by homeowners associations. And that seems a strikingly inappropriate mission for government.

In his weekly radio address, President Bush said that the Democrats in Congress have “passed a budget that would … pile on hundreds of billions of dollars in new government spending over the next five years.”

Can they beat the record of the past five years

Politicians are circling around hedge funds like vultures. They want to raise taxes on hedge funds, maybe by treating their capital gains as normal income. Why Because hedge funds are mysterious — do you know what they really do — and they have a lot of money. Make billion-dollar profits, get headlines, attract taxers — it’s as certain as ants at a picnic.

There are whole books on the correct theory of taxation. I’ve always assumed that Democratic members of Congress operate on the theory most clearly enunciated in 1990 by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D, Md.):

Let’s go and get it from those who’ve got it.

There are many theories of taxation, such as Haig-Simons, the Tiebout model, and the Ramsay Principle. But I’d bet that the Mikulski Principle explains actual taxation best.

Ron Paul is the San Antonio Spurs of Congress.

Washington Post sports columnist Mike Wise praises the resilience of the Spurs, who keep coming back to win the NBA championship without ever being quite a Bulls-style dynasty. He says the Spurs “had their crown taken away twice since 2003 and got it back both times.”

Similarly, Ron Paul is the only current member of Congress to have been elected three times as a non-incumbent. Given the 98 percent reelection rates for House members, it’s no great shakes to win three terms — or 10 terms — in a row. It’s winning that first one that’s the challenge. And Ron Paul has done that three times.

He first won in a special election for an open seat. He then lost his seat and won it back two years later, defeating the incumbent. After two more terms he left his seat to run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate (and thereby did his greatest disservice to the American Republic, as his seat was won by Tom DeLay). Twelve years later, in 1996, after some redistricting, he ran again for Congress, again defeating an incumbent, this time in the Republican primary. Some political scientist should study the political skills it takes to win election to Congress without the benefit of incumbency — three times.

A headline in the Los Angeles Times reads,

GOP senators getting visit from boss on immigration

And who is the boss of 49 Republican senators Minority Leader Mitch McConnell 50 million voters No, the Times is referring to President Bush. Thankfully, the suggestion that the president is the “boss” of the Senate appears only in the headline, not in the text of the article. But even headline writers should remember that Congress is created by Article I of the Constitution, and the president by Article II.

The president is not the boss of the Congress. Nor is he the commander-in-chief of the United States, as Sen. John McCain has said. Small-r republicans need to keep reminding people that what Gene Healy calls “the bipartisan romance with the imperial presidency” is not rooted in the American system.

Juanita Swedenburg, the Virginia winemaker who took her battle for economic liberty to the Supreme Court and won, died June 9 at the age of 82. Clint Bolick, who argued her case as a lawyer for the Institute for Justice, discussed it in his new book David’s Hammer:

My curiosity was sparked, however, during a visit in the early 1990s to a small winery in bucolic Middleburg, Virginia. The proprietor was a striking older woman, Juanita Swedenburg, who owned and operated the winery with her husband. She produced several good wines, including a chardonnay with the toastiest nose I can remember. We got to talking and Mrs. Swedenburg asked me what I did for a living. When I told her that, among other things, I challenged regulatory barriers to entrepreneurship, she exclaimed, “Have I got a regulation for you!”

Most states, it turned out, prohibited direct interstate shipments of wine to consumers. So that if tourists from another state visited Mrs. Swedenburg’s winery and asked how they could obtain her wines back home, she would have to reply, “You can’t.” …

As a descendant of settlers who fought in the American Revolution, Mrs. Swedenburg was outraged that such a stupid law could exist in a nation with the greatest free-enterprise system in the world.

Eventually, Bolick writes, the Institute for Justice took Mrs. Swedenburg’s case to the Supreme Court. He argued against a New York law, and Stanford law school dean Kathleen Sullivan (who also spoke recently at the Cato Institute) argued against a similar Michigan law. The Court ruled 5-4 that such laws “deprive citizens of their right to have access to the markets of other States on equal terms.” When Bolick launched his new book at the Cato Institute in April, Mrs. Swedenburg was sitting in the front row.

Juanita Swedenburg was the kind of citizen a free republic needs. After a career in the foreign service, she and her husband “retired” to a Virginia farm that had been in business since 1762. They set up a winery and worked seven days a week to make it a success. As the Washington Post says, “Mrs. Swedenburg did not take the Constitution for granted.” She knew that there was something wrong with a law that prevented willing customers from buying the fruits of her labors, wherever they lived. And when she found a lawyer who shared her enthusiasm for both wine and constitutional liberty, she pressed him to take the case on behalf of her and her customers.

Like John Peter Zenger, Rosa Parks, Allan Bakke, Michael Hardwick, Bill Barlow, and many others, Mrs. Swedenburg made our constitutional rights real by using them. Raise a glass to her memory.

Tuesday is the 40th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage. It’s a good time to reflect on the social progress that Brink Lindsey discusses in The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Changed America’s Politics and Culture. Indeed, the Freedom to Marry Coalition has been celebrating the anniversary with a series of newspaper ads highlighting the interracial marriages of such prominent Americans as Jeb Bush, Mitch McConnell, Clarence Thomas, Jim Webb, and Tiger Woods.

But Virginia’s attempts to impede the course of true love didn’t begin or end with its “anti-miscegenation” statute. As I noted for Reason a couple of years ago, in the early part of the 20th century the state was in the habit of sterilizing “imbeciles.” The Supreme Court, influenced by Progressivism, approved that exercise in social engineering. And in our own times, Virginia has been repeatedly banning same-sex marriage, not worrying excessively about how much collateral damage it does to wills, custody agreements, medical powers of attorney, or joint bank accounts.

I wrote about the state’s tradition of interfering with private choices:

Neither of these now-derided laws is a perfect match with the predicament facing gays in Virginia, but both flowed from an arrogant desire by the state to control private relationships. The state is schizophrenic about such things, but if the past is any indicator, things do not look good for gay Virginians. In the 1995 case of Sharon Bottoms, the Virginia high court took a two-year-old child away from his lesbian mother, because of her sexual orientation. If voters pass the amendment against gay marriage and civil unions next year, it would have real teeth. Already, many gays in Virginia are talking about moving to Washington or Maryland if what they view as an anti-gay crusade doesn’t recede. If things continue on their present course, the state might have to amend its slogan, “Virginia is for lovers,” to include the caveat, “some exceptions apply.”

The Washington Post reports on Five Brothers, the blog written by the sons of Mitt Romney, with heartwarming stories about just how wholesome and wonderful Dad is. Indeed, the whole family’s just so . . . wholesome:

The Post notes that the blog allows visitors to post comments and questions, “though answers are not guaranteed.” Thus,

A query such as, “Being a Mormon, does Romney campaign on Sunday ” gets a reply — yes, Romney tries to make it — while something like, “Have any of the five Romney brothers, all healthy heterosexuals well under 42, considered volunteering for military service in the Global War on Terror ” is ignored.

The Sullivan Brothers they’re not.

There’s good news tonight:

The rate of death from heart disease in the U.S. was cut in half between 1980 and 2000 thanks to better medical treatment and a reduction in the incidence of some risk factors, a new study shows.

That’s wonderful news, the kind that ought to be celebrated. We hear about threats and dangers and cancer clusters and transnational viruses and flying TB carriers, and many of those are real concerns. But the big picture, as Indur Goklany demonstrates at great length in his new book, is–well, let his title explain it: The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet.

But this great news about heart disease appeared on page D4 of the Wall Street Journal and on page 13D of USA Today. As far as I can tell, it didn’t appear in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, or the Washington Post at all, nor on any NPR program. Though on the NY Times website, you can find an article the same day on the tiny increase in deaths from West Nile virus. And the heart disease story can be found on the Post website, though not in the print paper.

More details appeared in the Journal’s Health Blog:

The decline in heart disease, reported in the current New England Journal of Medicine, saved an estimated 341,000 lives in 2000 compared with the number of deaths that would have been expected if the levels of heart disease in 1980 persisted.

341,000 fewer deaths from heart disease in one year! There’s good news tonight–even if you won’t find it in the newspapers.