TOM MAGUIRE ON REGULATING SUGAR LIKE ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO.

BOLD PREDICTIONS: Within fifty years Coca Cola and the NFL will be the fodder of campfire stories meant to scare excitable pre-teens. It can’t happen? Sixty years ago Frank and Dean were the Kings of Cool, smoking cigarettes live on national television; now they would get busted and the President of the United States is heckled in his own home for being a smoker.

If high school football were invented today, any school board listening to the injury rate and equipment expense would laugh out loud. It’s days are numbered.

And Coke? Sales will be regulated as cigarettes are today, and sales to minors won’t be legal. And someone somewhere will be charged with child abuse for giving a kid a Coke. Really.

Who dares to contradict this?

UPDATE: Sarah Hoyt does! “I dare contradict it. In the darkest days of the cold war, Heinlein predicted that we’d hang the commissars from their own guts from lampposts. He seems to have missed slightly. We just won the cold war. I predict in fifty years we’ll have won the cultural cold war and we’ll laugh at the idea of government restricting sugar or salt (and possibly alcohol and cigarettes, too). I’m safe predicting this, because command economies don’t do well and if we don’t win and soon, I doubt there will be enough organized civilization left to call me on it. Win-win.”