What’s next? A “conservative” call for banning soft drinks and junk food?

The dietary habits of fat people are not my business and I do not want them to be.

I say this notwithstanding an emerging trend among certain conservatives:

Overeating and not exercising is a choice that often leads to a multitude of health issues like diabetes and heart disease.

The obese are being coddled, while we all pick up the tab with higher health insurance costs to treat them.

They should be called exactly what they are — fat, overweight, obese — so they learn to make healthy lifestyle changes.

Call them whatever you want, but other people’s habits are their business and I am not going to fall into the trap of making their habits my business — especially because socialistic government programs want me to.

And of course, if other people’s fat is my business, then it follows that so is their smoking, drinking, drugs, lack of exercise and their sex lives.

There is no end to such communitarian nonsense.

That the government might want to make me pay for other people’s bad habits is totally irrelevant.

Actually, right there I was wrong. It’s highly relevant. What the government is doing — trying to involve me in other people’s lives — ought to outrage me. And it ought to outrage me a lot more than what other people might be doing.

So what’s up with these communitarian conservatives who act like busybody liberals?

“IT COSTS US ALL!” you say?

Yeah, freedom has a price.

(I happen to be one of those old cranks who thinks that taking it away has a higher price.)

MORE: We also need to stop coddling drivers who make us all pick up the tab for their habits.

Warrantless saliva and blood testing is a small price to pay!

LOS ANGELES, CA — As drivers prove their innocence at warrantless police checkpoints this New Year, they will not only be scrutinized over their potential consumption of alcohol.  A new technology will enable the police to detect and arrest drivers for having marijuana, narcotics, and “other drugs” in their bloodstreams.

The recently unveiled device is a portable saliva swab analyzer, capable of immediately sampling body fluids for the presence of foreign intoxicants.  The machines were paid for by grants from the state.

“Traditionally, our office has focused on drunken driving cases,” Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer said. “We’re expanding drug collection and aggressively enforcing all impaired-driving laws.”

The city attorney said that he had “anecdotal” evidence that medical marijuana users were endangering the streets.  The new tactics were applauded by the checkpoint lobbyist group, MADD.

But of course. Other people’s bad habits cost us all!