Thread: This burns my bacon! More nanny state bureaucratic nonesense.

The trouble is that society is made up of people who are either contributing to it or drawing from it. Over a lifetime people will often shift sides several times but equally some people will be a constant drain on society, paid for by the majority. As such it is important that the state looks at how best it can prevent people being a drain on their (our) resources and one way is trying targeting those people who live an unhealthy lifestyle, which will impact on their ability to contribute in a positive way, and also trying to make sure they don't pass that lifestyle to their offspring.

There is a bigger picture, the aim is to maintain things for the future generations the attitude that we should be able to live whatever lifestyle we wan ignores the fact that our lifestyles affect others too.

Currently (in the UK at least) the birth rate in families is on average 1.8 i.e. for every 2 people (who are having kids) we are producing less than 2 future tax payers. Coupled with that the advances in medical science mean people are living longer and requiring more care. So today's children are going to have a hard job supporting the cost of looking after the current working generation, as it stands we are moving towards producing a society which could be to unhealthy to support itself.

Originally Posted by ChesterCopperpot

What are you, some kind of Communist?

Very far from it!

When you grasp the fundamentals of how states work you can see that they tend to behave like a business. Although they would not admit it.

People are a commodity to states, some are an asset and tax payers others are a liability i.e. claiming benefits, for a society to succeed the the assets must be greater than the liabilities. So in a society with a reducing base of tax payers as described above you have 2 ways to tackle the problem.

1) Import - i.e. economic migration, bring workers in from other countries. This is already happening and as there are plenty of people keen to move to the richer economies from the developing world where the global population growths are occurring.

2) Improve the quality of the indigenous population. I.e. reduce their requirement for care and benefits and try to keep them able to work and pay taxes for as long as we can. Current moves to do this are reducing smoking, drinking, and drug addiction and improving their health and fitness.