Jacob Sullum has (another) great Reason column on out-of-control food fascists and the sinister plans they’re hatching to rob me of my nickels — all because I happen to like the occasional greasy french fry with my dead pressed animal-in-a-bun.

In his column, Sullum makes the Swiftian suggestion that rather than taxing all junk foods (which punishes the thin as well as the fat), we simply have the government weigh us once a year — and then assess us each a specific tax based on how overweight we happen to be. Here’s a taste (albeit a small one. No need for gluttony):

The war on obesity, like the war on smoking, is all about protecting people from their own choices.Yet its Orwellian tacticians argue that their real aim is liberating people from the conditions that make them overeat.

‘We know that people can become biologically predisposed to getting overfed,’ John Banzhaf, an anti-tobacco veteran turned fat fighter, recently told the British newspaper The Independent. ‘It’s not an addiction exactly, but it doesn’t leave people with a completely free choice in what they eat, either.’

The Independent added that many Americans can’t get healthy food even if they want it. ‘Once you head inland from the coasts, away from the big population centers and college towns,’ it reported, ‘the very notion of unprocessed fresh food’ vanishes. ‘It’s a straightforward question of availability, giving the lie to food industry claims that consumers can exercise free choice in deciding what to put in their mouths.’

This is such an audacious misrepresentation that I don’t know whether to refute it or simply stand in awe. While they may have trouble finding papayas or radicchio, health-conscious shoppers in even the dinkiest towns can easily get all the nutrients they need, stay thin, and keep their cholesterol low with a combination of inexpensive staples such as tuna, chicken, eggs, milk products, bread, pasta, rice, beans, potatoes, and unexotic fruits and vegetables.

The Independent’s bizarre claim that it’s impossible to eat a healthy diet in Middle America reflects a basic premise of the anti-fat movement: People do not freely choose what they eat; they are manipulated into bad habits by sneaky corporations. Hence punishing them for eating the wrong things (through special taxes) or shielding them from messages that might encourage them to do so (through advertising restrictions) enhances their freedom.

It once seemed safe to consider such ideas manifestly absurd. Sadly, that is no longer true.

This past quarter, I had a student who argued (as part of her coursework) that the federal government should step in and “do something” about the “obesity crisis.” I suggested sewing shut the mouths of morbidly obese people — y’know, put them on an intravenous diet of fruit and wheatgrass juices while simultaneously re-educating them (via government-produced videos and graphics-intensive literature printed on shiny paper) about nutrition and exercise (“These are your legs. Move them, and you burn calories! And this is a donut. Which is working its way to your heart to kill you even as we speak…”). This “corrective” program could be completed on an outpatient basis, I noted, though it’d probably be best to keep the lardies under observation for a good month or so.

I’m not sure she exactly agreed with the plan, mind you — but she did nod approvingly several times, muttering something I couldn’t quite make out about “live-in nurses” and “mouth condoms,” whatever those are.

I was so frustrated that I went home and ate enough Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to choke a smallish water buffalo.