The rhetoric of the “Nanny State” has reached a new fever pitch. This week in California, a Sacramento lawmaker proposed a new tax on soda for the purposes of curbing childhood obesity. That’s right, a tax on fat kids. According to Reuters, the tax would amount to “21 cents per gallon of syrup in bottled drinks and $2 per gallon of syrup used to create soft drinks in soda fountains.” The expected proceeds of the bill – about $342 million per year, would be used to fund school health programs, after-school activities and “childhood obesity prevention programs.”

Has the end finally come? Has the rhetoric your crazy libertarian friend’s been spouting off all along about paternalistic regulations on ordinary behavior been true all along? The lawmaker, Sen. Deborah Oritz, has this to say, “The problem is that Americans have lost signs of moderation, and fail to recognize how many additional calories soda adds to their diets.”

That’s right, you heard it here first. Sen. Oritz, in her superior wisdom, has made it her goal to tell you, the individual, how best to live your life.

What’s next, a tax on condoms to fund teen pregnancy prevention?

The remarkably frightening thing is that Oritz’s tax on soda is nothing new; states including Arkansas, Virginia and Washington already impose such taxes on soft drinks, albeit for the purposes of fighting litter instead of childhood obesity. Yet the practice of using taxes on certain goods for the ends of social policy is nothing new. Such practices are known as excise taxes (or as they are more commonly known, “sin taxes”) and have been around longer than the income tax itself. Have a beer and you can expect to pay up to 43 percent of the cost in taxes – make it a bottle of rum (or any other distilled spirits) and that figure jumps to 72 percent. Talk to any smoker and they’ll tell you about taxes on the order of a dollar a pack and rising – and some lawmakers such as John McCain would like to double that figure.

In essence, excise taxes represent a back-door intrusion into your pocketbook, all for the declared aim of “encouraging virtue and discouraging vice.” The irony here is that this is the same rhetoric used by Saudi Arabian “virtue police,” the kind infamous for issuing beatings to women who don’t conform to a strict code of dress or men whose beards do not conform to strict Islamic law. Unlike other taxes, however, excise taxes are effectively “stealth taxes” that only manifest themselves as the end price people pay on goods – no note is made of any amount of the tax you pay on the taxed goods. Furthermore, such taxes are ultimately regressive – in a study by the Cato Institute, it was shown that a $1.10 tax on cigarettes (as proposed by McCain) would be paid for by more than half of smokers with incomes under $30,000 while only 1 percent would be paid by smokers with incomes of $100,000 or more.

Aside from this, one is inclined to wonder where the government draws the right to suddenly get into the business of regulating individuals’ day-to-day behavior, right down to the food and drink they consume. After all, what business does the state have to tell one if they are “too fat”?

Ay, but there’s the rub, the forces of the Nanny State argue. Your corpulence has a “toll upon society,” they tell you, and you must pay. Hence the logic behind cigarette and alcohol taxes. Even though it has long been established that cigarette taxes are cash cows for individual states and take in more money than is spent on matters such as Medicare. The fact remains that such taxes are used more often to cover shortfalls in state budgets due to fiscal incontinence than the toll of smokers upon society. And who can blame them? Smokers are an easy target. No one likes being around secondhand smoke. But does this give government the right to extort members of society for their own self-destructive choices?

Anti-smoking advocates counter that the toll smokers place upon other members of society through the dangers of second-hand smoke and other factors warrant their extortion, yet this logic utterly implodes. After all, if the damages caused by secondhand smoke are so significant, why does the state even allow cigarettes to be legal? Ultimately, no state is willing to cross that fine line – not for fear of political backlash but ultimately for fear of strangling the Golden Goose.

Aside from the paternalistic nature of excise taxes, there lies a second danger involved – the invitation for black-market forces that excise taxes bring. Robert Levy of the Cato Institute had this to say, “When California, Maryland, Michigan, and New York hiked their cigarette taxes, the result was rampant smuggling – not just from low-tax neighboring states, but also from military bases, Indian reservations, and even Mexico, with imported cigarettes being smuggled back into the United States.”

In essence, excise taxes serve as a regressive tax upon the poorest members of society, taxing behaviors that the state doesn’t approve of. The dangerous precedent set by the California soda tax, if it is enacted, is that it now serves to tax behavior which can no longer be classified a tangible “toll upon society” in terms of a strain upon Medicare or the toll of lives that DUI brings. It’s a tool of blatant social manipulation. If the government has the power to levy taxes on fat people, where will it end?

One thing’s for certain, enjoy your Big Macs and super-size fries while you can. Big Brother is watching – and he thinks you could stand to shed a few pounds.

Steve Skutnik is a senior in physics from Palm Harbor, Fla. He is election commissioner of GSB.