Free-Market Solutions for Overweight Americans?

Why not?

The shaming commericals and government programs sure are NOT working.

Some 32% of adult American men and 35% of women are clinically obese. The proportion hasn't swelled in recent years, but it hasn't shrunk either, a study of 2008 data suggests. School posters, virally marketed videos, healthy-eating classes, mandatory swimming lessons, minimum school-recess times, celebrity chefs in charge of school-meal recipes, bicycle lanes, junk-food ad bans, calorie-content labels, hectoring physicians, birthday-cake bans, monetary rewards for weight loss—they've all been tried, and they've all largely failed.

Maybe we need to stop trying to devise top-down answers and instead encourage bottom-up ones to evolve through individual choice. Or so argue two Canadian academics, Neil Seeman and Patrick Luciani, in a new book called "XXL: Obesity and the Limits of Shame." After all, as Friedrich Hayek pointed out, the true genius of markets is that they discover things. Perhaps the answer to obesity is to spend money not on the producers (of gyms, diets, surgery, vegetables) but on the consumers.

Drawing a direct analogy with the effect of vouchers in the education system, Messrs. Seeman and Luciani suggest "healthy-living vouchers" that could be redeemed from different (certified) places—gyms, diet classes, vegetable sellers and more. Education vouchers, they point out, are generally disliked by rich whites as being bad for poor blacks—and generally liked by poor blacks. A bottom-up solution empowers people better than top-down government fiat.

So instead of spending large sums on ads to shame us into better eating habits, spend the money on vouchers handed out to the overweight and let them find whatever provider of goods or services best meets their particular dieting needs. After all, the root causes of obesity are multifarious and new ones are being added all the time—such as diet sodas, gut bacteria, genes, sleep apnea, leptin levels, medication, depression, poverty and peer pressure. So the solutions need to be multipronged, too. What works for you may not work for me.

Like public education, there have to be new market-driven ideas that must be given an opportunity. The current course is simply NOT working.