Monday, May 29, 2006

Government mandated exercise coming next?

I've seen an increase in commercials recently reminding people to buckle-up or else they'll get a ticket. Some even try to make you laugh by using cartoon cars from a current children's movie. Walter Williams had a nice op-ed on this recently: Click It or Ticket. He asks whether government-mandated exercise will be coming next. I think this slippery slope logic makes sense, and might just lead to some pretty outragious government decisions in the next decade or two. We've already got requirements on things like seatbelts and helmets, and a ban on smoking almost everywhere. I predict this trend will continue: more and more smoking bans, increasing regulations on ingredients at restaurants, and various other regulations aimed at lowering sky-rocketing healthcare costs, which are increasingly paid by the government through entitlement programs (read: paid for by all of us as taxpayers). On this, Williams notes:

As to your statement 'Lack of safety belt use is a growing public health issue that... also costs us all billions of dollars every year,' that's not a problem of liberty. It's a problem of socialism. No human should be coerced by the state to bear the medical expense, or any other expense, for his fellow man. In other words, the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another is morally offensive.

Well said Walter.

So will government-mandated exercise be next? How would that work? Would it just be a weight-numbers game, where we all have weekly checkins with schedules as to how much weight we must lose and by when? Kind of like voluntary weight watchers programs, except without the pesky "voluntary" part of it.

Or will it take the form of business regulation, where businesses are forced to provide 30-minutes a day to all employees for "exercise time"? (In that scenario, the unemployed and homeless could be required to exercise as a condition of receiving unemployment checks or room at a shelter. So just about everyone would get their exercise it seems.)

I'm just trying to think along the lines of other government programs, like public education, where kids are herded into gym classes on a regular schedule each week, where (based on my childhood experience at a public school) they tend to get either very little exercise at all or they play chaotic deathmatches of dodgeball, floor hockey, etc. Some days we'd get safe, effective exercise, but that was a minority of the time.

Or even better than a numbers game or exercise at work, how about government-run gyms? Your SS number gets you in the door, your exercise is monitored and recorded, then a monthly review is done and you are penalized (ticket?) if you didn't exercise enough -- or the right mix of routines. And given the government's track record on... well... just about everything, I'm sure those gyms would remain top-notch, clean, safe, and effective operations. No doubt.

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1 Comments:

At 8:30 PM , Blogger chris Grieb said...

Stone; You have a devilish mind. We won't have a nanny state but a nurse state and the nurse will be Ratched.

 

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