The monthly Marc Faber piece came out today. To get right to the question one might ask, he continues to be constructive on gold, both as a long-term investment and as a relative value to any other asset class right now.
But of more interest to me was his discussion of the fact that the American Medical Association is pushing to have obesity categorized as a disease. Faber finds much to object to, but it primarily relates to the idea that people no longer have to take responsibility for their own behavior and the government is provided with yet another avenue to meddle in our lives. By contrast, I thought about it in terms of the David Goldhill book that I read several months ago. One of the big risks with our growing health care system is that everything eventually gets re-defined as a medical condition, and the consequence is that we end up with an ever-expanding list of items that someone else should pay for. To be succinct, the problem with all the government proposals is an underlying assumption that there is a fixed amount of health care that everyone needs. But, as the AMA move should make clear, when someone else is paying, more and more things will get sucked into the vortex of health care, with rising costs to follow.
