"Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and [others] are Turning America into a Nation of Children."

Great interview. Some highlights...

Reason Magazine - Nanny State 911!:

"In his new book Nanny State, Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi documents in appalling and encyclopedic detail exactly 'how food fascists, teetotaling do-gooders, priggish moralists, and other boneheaded bureaucrats are turning America into a nation of children.' If there's a smoking ban, a mandatory exercise program, or censorious city government out there, it's pilloried in Nanny State...

reason: What's the 30-second version of your book?

David Harsanyi: It's a book about the most basic aspect of freedom: free will. The right to make the "wrong" choice. It's about the rise of the babysitter state. It's also about how intrusions -- ones that we may find piddling and sometimes humorous -- when bunched together make for a dangerous movement.

reason: So that explains why you open your book with quotes from G.K. Chesterton ("The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool...but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog") and Cheap Trick ("Too many people want to save the world.")

...reason: Your first chapter lays into "Twinkie Fascists," folks who try to limit what we can eat. Explain.

Harsanyi: First of all, the ideas Twinkie Fascists come up with -- from regulating food portions to outlawing unhealthy ingredients like trans fats to creating "health zones" to taxing certain undesirable foods -- are not based in reality. People have already made their choices and these intrusions, which nip on the margins, won't change those lifestyles. What is it does, though, is accelerate the nanny state. If we can ban one ingredient, why not every unhealthy ingredient? If we can tax a candy bar, why not a steak? There lies the danger.

reason: I ate lunch today at a Chinese buffet--all you can eat. At least half of the patrons were super-fat fucks--we're talking seriously obese, probably even on the moon. I alone ate about 10 pounds of food. Don't people need help in restraining themselves?

Harsanyi: Maybe they don't want to be restrained. I don't remember reading anything in the Constitution that says I can't be a fat fuck. (Though most of the founders clearly kept themselves in awesome shape.)

...There are plenty of people in this country who are healthy. And there are plenty people in this country who aren't. It's none of my business. and it's certainly none of government's business to coerce us into either camp...

reason: So what explains the dynamic of a public that doesn't believe in the efficacy of government yet calls for more nanny state regulations? (Please don't say it's the fluoride in the water.)

Harsanyi: It's because everyone has their own issue. I get a lot of people who tell me they agree with the book in general, but not on smoking bans. Or they agree on everything, but something really needs to be done about obesity. Or drunk driving. The right not to hear a word that offends you. The right to health care. The right not to smell my cigar. And so on. When you add it all up, you have a nanny state, a place where people make no distinction between convincing us to do the right thing and coercing us to do it."

Much more at the link.