A popular justification for the FDA’s just-announced ban on trans fats is that it will prevent people prone to eat unhealthy foods from running up health-care costs – costs that would be shifted onto innocent others. The idea is that it’s wrong to allow Jones to act in ways that unilaterally impose costs on Smith. Yet at the same time that the FDA is ostensibly trying to save Smith from having to pay Jones’s medical expenses, Smith is forced to do so by Obamacare.

If it’s wrong for people to be burdened by other people’s medical expenses – so wrong that government meddling in our diets is justified – how can it be right for government to create a scheme that forces people to be burdened by other people’s medical expenses?