Like most of my generation, I first felt the oppression of tyranny at the dinner table where my mother would imprison me until I consumed every last morsel of a disagreeable meal.

Usually, it was a food I would eventually find more appetizing with a less jejune palate. My distaste for tyranny was more precocious and permanent.

In the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 (HR 3200), the classic blueprint for the liberal reformation of health care in America, on page 934 we find: “Subtitle B-National Prevention and Wellness Strategy.” This portion of the bill empowers the Secretary of Health and Human Services to create “.a national strategy that is designed to improve the nation’s health through evidenced based clinical and community prevention and wellness activities.” After dispensing with the Constitution and State’s rights where will this take us?

This June, President Obama’s selection for Director of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), Thomas Frieden, MD, took office. This position does not require Senate conformation, a subject which deserves reconsideration. Dr. Friedan is more famously known as New York City’s former health commissioner where his arrogance was on full display in New York and on the national stage. As you will recall, he was instrumental in achieving the abolition of trans-fat (the thing that makes food taste good) from all foods in a city where people fancy themselves at least intelligent enough to know what to eat. Additionally, too stupid to know what to drink, New Yorkers were targeted by Dr. Frieden to pay a punitive tax on soft drink consumption designed to change their behavior, combat obesity and enhance the city’s revenue. As CDC Director, Friedan will be intimately involved in framing our national wellness strategy.

A similar soda tax was considered in drawing up the health care reform bills in Congress. However, realizing how contemptuous it was, they struck the idea. Speaking on the Congressional retreat, Kenneth Thorpe, former health policy official under President Clinton said “They’re at such a fragile place, introducing anything new and big like that into the mold is not likely to happen.” Dr. Frieden, dedicated  fighter of obesity and righteous custodian of our collective health, is not so easily daunted.

This summer, Dr. Frieden and the CDC hosted the “Weight of the Nation Conference” on obesity in Washington D.C. Spokes persons included grand paragons of self-restraint and caloric discipline such as former President Bill Clinton. At the conference Dr Frieden revealed his belief that-“Political commitment is the leading predictor of effective action.” He admits that companies, through litigation and coercion, will need to be made to comply with standards that he and the government will set, as to what is fit for you to eat and drink. He does not believe you have any individual rights. In fact, he is quoted here-“The only way on a societal basis to reduce the prevalence of obesity is through community action, not through individual clinical interventions.”

This will be accomplished through confiscatory taxes on people that consume certain foods and with taxes levied on the manufacturers of these products. Therefore, like every other liberal government program it will cost jobs, increase taxes and diminish liberty.

Where would a liberal government policy be without a hypocrite?

Dr. Frieden penned an article in the April 30, 2009 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine with fellow obesity scold Kelly Brownwell, PhD. -“Ounces of Prevention-The Public Policy Case for Taxes on Sugared Beverages”  Dr. Brownwell is the Director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. At first glance you might think that Dr. Brownwell has adopted obesity as an avocation and would be an unlikely braggart of the advantages of physical fitness. A Google image will suffice.

From the Rudd Center’s website: “The Rudd Center expects many obesity related issues will be resolved through regulation, legislation and litigation, and we are pleased to remain on the cutting edge of these legal initiatives and developments.” Moreover, on policy: “Rather than focusing on changing people’s behavior one person at a time, effective public policy makes positive changes in the environments in which we live.”

These people are frighteningly out of the reach of the power of the electorate to remove them. They understand, as did the Congress, that given the chance the American people would reject this type of autocracy. Therefore, they have to have unaccountable accomplices in the government like Dr. Frieden to help them forward their agenda. It needs to be reiterated that the CDC Director position is an appointed one. What can be accomplished is to hold those who would place power in the hands of such ideologues accountable.

2010 is closer than you think and its consequence may reverberate for generations.