By: Guest Column RICHARD MCKENZIE
Mr.McKenzie is a professor in the Graduate School of Management at UCI.

Further the Discussion By: DENNY FREIDENRICH
Mr. Freidenrich,the father of three schoolage children,lives in Laguna
Beach.

About the Guest Column Guest columnists are local writers with a point of
view about local,state or national issues. We are looking for good writing,
familiarity with the issue, a fresh perspective all in about 500 words.
In Further the Discussion, below, other views on the same issue are
presented sometimes in rebuttal to the Guest Column, other times simply
adding a new angle to the debate.

GUEST COLUMN
The arguments for regulation of smoking could as easily be made about obesity

Hold your ire and fire on tobacco. A Yale University psychology professor
has identified a far more serious and widespread threat to public health
and the healthcare budgets of Americans: the "toxic food environment" that
has made obesity a public plague. The professor's solution? Use the full
weight of the government's fiscal authority to simultaneously trim American
waistlines and the projected Medicare budget deficits. According to Yale
Professor Kelly Brownell's reasoning, fatty foods should be taxed in
proportion to their fat content, while healthy foods and exercise programs
should be subsidized.

The professor's proposals could be dismissed as comical if they weren't
resurrected in the media while Congress began considering another round of
tax increases on cigarettes with paternalistic intent: to curb smoking and
to lower smokers' claims on the country's health care resources. We must
worry that the professor's "fat tax" will be taken seriously by some future
Congress and administration because the arguments for both the cigarette
and fat taxes are remarkably similar.

Tobacco kills, perhaps more than 400,000 Americans a year through various
lung diseases. Fat is surely a greater killer through heart and artery
diseases. A quarter of Americans smoke. Nearly a third of Americans are
obese.

Smokers are, supposedly, walking tax burdens for nonsmokers because
smoking causes healthcare problems and Medicare and Medicaid expenditures.
Obese Americans may impose an even greater tax on trim Americans because of
their greater numbers and because they may not die as early and as quickly
as smokers may.

Paternalistic tax policies are politically seductive, especially when
considered one at a time. They offer the prospect of "improved" behavior
(as the tax advocates define "improvement") for a subset of Americans who,
because of what they choose to buy with their incomes, have been vilified.
Paternalistic taxes also offer politicians fewer fiscal woes.

However, the tobacco tax is necessarily enacted on a very slippery policy
slope, one that for the sake of consistency in argument can be applied
elsewhere with equal ease, as the Yale professor has shown. True democrats
must be concerned about consistency in policies because of the demands of
equal treatment under the law.

Almost all Americans, ever members of Congress, do things that are, by some
standards, "bad" for them. Should some Americans be permitted to continue
their "misguided" ways while others are forced to change or pay?

There is an old and reliable way by which Americans can be induced to
consider the consequences of their own bad habits: Have them pay a greater
share of their own medical care costs by cutting Medicare and Medicaid
subsidies. It's time for Congress to recognize that its past policies have
been sending the wrong signals to American consumers. Likewise, supporters
of a cigarette or fat tax should consider that freedom is of little value
if people don't have the right to do their own thing, for good or bad.

FURTHER THE DISCUSSION

Do we really want our children selling chocolate?

My 5yearold son recently came home from kindergarten with a fundraising
appeal stuffed inside his backpack. He, along with his classmates, was
being asked to sell boxes of chocolates as a means of supporting his
elementary school. At first, I reached for my wallet; then, in a rare
moment of reflection, I decided not to buy the candy.

It is never easy to say no to a 5yearold. But no I said and her's why: My
goal, and I suppose the goal of most parents, is to raise healthy children
physically, emotionally and socially. Asking my son, or any child, to
sell an unhealthy product defies all logic. In plain English, it is wrong.

I know my son's school needs extra money. But do our kids really need to
sell boxes of chocolates to keep their schools afloat? As adults, I know we
try to limit our own intake of chocolate for several reasons: It is bad for
our waistlines and it is hell on our cholesterol. We try to limit our
children's chocolate quotient because we do not want our little ones
bouncing off the walls and it rots their teeth. Am I missing something, or
has everyone forgotten to connect the dots here?

The issue I raised with the local PTA president was simple: Let's find a
healthy alternative to selling candy. No, not granola bars or fresh fruit
smoothies. Let's sell sunscreen. Doctors and scientists tell us we should
be using it virtually every day in the fight against skin cancer. We can
buy it in bulk and privatelabel it for fundraising purposes. Lastly, and
perhaps most important, sunscreen is healthy.

I am not trying to rain on anyone's parade, especially the PTA volunteers
who raise so much money for my son's school. Chocolate tastes good and it
makes me feel good, too. But I could say the same thing about cigarettes.
They taste good and make some people feel good, but we would never
encourage kids to sell them. So why do we encourage kids to sell boxes of
candy?

Where do we draw the line about the ends justifying the means? Do we want
to reinforce the message that a profit on any legal item is acceptable, or
are we willing to make value judgments that some items are abetter, that
is, healthier than others?