Look what just came out of Mississippi:

• No fat people allowed: Only the slim will be allowed to dine in public (Junkfood Science)

Should [MS House Bill No. 282] pass, scales will appear at the door of restaurants, people with BMIs of 30 or higher won’t be allowed to be served. And to comply with government regulations, restaurants will have to keep records of patrons’ BMIs.

This is perhaps not such a fantastic idea.

First of all, it’s flagrantly immoral. The sponsors of this bill — “Representative W.T. Mayhall, Jr., a retired pharmaceutical salesman with DuPont-Merk. Its co-authors are Bobby Shows, a businessman, and John Read, a pharmacist”, according to the above article — are attempting to assert direct control over the behaviour of others in relation to themselves, violating their rights to liberty of their persons. They are also asserting control over free exchange between two parties, violating both parties’ rights to property. By monitoring restaurants for compliance with the bill, they are also infringing upon the patrons’ privacy.

Second, it’s invasively coercive. Mayhall, Shows, and Read are telling their constituents: “You don’t know what’s best for yourselves; you cannot be trusted even to feed yourselves. You may not decide where you shall eat tonight; we, the all-knowing government, will decide for you.” They are (probably inadvertently) indoctrinating the people they represent to a hopelessly obedient world-view, where every decision is made for them by well-meaning and inaccessible “experts”. Friedrich Hayek warns us that:

[T]he most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people. [...] The important point is that the political ideals of a people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives.

Force people to live under pervasive and intrusive government oversight, and they will come to expect it.

This might be acceptable if the government’s pervasive and intrusive oversight worked. Unfortunately, that brings us to my third point: the Body Mass Index is bullshit. It’s basically a ratio of weight to height squared. BMI might be a useful starting point for evaluating broad trends of obesity in a generally sedentary population, but on an individual basis it is utterly useless. It was never intended as a diagnostic tool, yet that is precisely how Mayhall, Shows, and Read intend to apply it.

Finally, Bill 282 — like so many other attempts to legislate into existence a better society — considers the wrong problem simply because it is the easiest to address. People do not become obese simply by eating at restaurants; thus, focusing upon the restaurants is a waste of time. People instead become obese from what and how much they eat and how that food intake interacts with their metabolisms (which are significantly affected by what and how much they eat, how and how often they exercise, and a staggeringly vast number of other factors — none of which is more than glancingly related to whether they ate at a restaurant).

It’s a spectacularly bad idea.