I recall listening some time ago as a lefty airwave commander n' controller sputtered incredulously at a guest's suggestion that ever-increasing government management of health care will inexorably embolden central planners to ever-increasingly meddle in the private affairs of individuals, particularly their eating choices, in ways inconceivable to most freedom-loving Americans of the day.

This was way back in the Mesolithic mists of late 2005, mind you - several thousand hours before the New York City Board of Health voted to ban trans fatty acids.

It was all the skeptical host could do to suppress rude hoots of howling derision when his clearly paranoid ideological punching bag forewarned of a day when bureaucratic buttinskies would attempt to outlaw such unhealthy, unnecessary temptations as, for example, deep-fried cheese-flavored cornmeal snacks.

Well, we've certainly evolved since those primitive, laissez-faire days of a couple dozen or so months ago. And we no doubt owe much gratitude to forward-thinking worry warts like Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin. In addition to urging that we mandatorily empty "food of minimal nutritional value" from vending machines and lunchrooms in federally-supported youth indoctrination centers, Harkin is laboring valiantly to shake this couch-potato nation from its collective post-prandial somnolence and sound the alarm that "(p)arents are being undermined by the junk food culture that is increasingly promoted to our kids on TV, on the Internet and even in their schools."

But for all the regulatory innovations and political advocacy by hard-charging public health-minded policymakers on our behalf, America is still waddling furlongs behind the medically advanced thoroughbred single-payer social engineers of the United Kingdom.

Case in point: Britian's Local Government Association is of the über-progressive opinion that "Fat children ‘should be taken from parents' to curb obesity epidemic," both The Times of London and the BBC reported this week. The Times:

David Rogers, the Local Government Association's public health spokesman, said that by 2012 an estimated million children would be obese and by 2025 about a quarter of all boys would be grossly overweight.

"Councils are increasingly having to consider taking action where parents are putting children's health in real danger," he said. "As the obesity epidemic grows, these tricky cases will keep on cropping up. Councils would step in to deal with an undernourished and neglected child, so should a case with a morbidly obese child be different? If parents consistently place their children at risk through bad diet and lack of exercise, is it right that a council should step in to keep the child's health under review?"

"The nation's expanding waistline threatens to have a devastating impact on our public services. It's a huge issue for public health, but it also risks placing an unprecedented amount of pressure on council services."

The association called for a national debate on how much local authorities should intervene in obesity cases. As a basic minimum, social services or health visitors should talk to the families involved, give them advice and show them how to provide healthy meals. "But in the worst cases [the children] would need to be put on ‘at risk' registers or taken into care."

According to the LGA press release (which reads faintly Pythonesque), in addition to the health costs and consequences associated with being "obese" -- a word banned from use in reference to children by the U.K. Department of Health, incidentally -- there are a number of other areas upon which this "epidemic is having an expensive impact on local public services."

• Furniture in school classes, gyms and canteens are having to be made wider for larger children and to meet new standards
• Town halls widening crematoria furnaces to cater for spiralling numbers of stouter clients, costing tens of thousands of pounds
• Fire services being called in to winch obese members of the public out of dangerous buildings in emergencies such as fire
• Ambulances being re-equipped with extra-wide stretchers and winches for obese people
• Councils having to provide obese residents with adaptations to their houses and help with the provision of walking aids
• Fears that local public transport, including buses and trams, will be able to accommodate fewer passengers as people get bigger

No question, the scenes with the social workers and lifestyle cops explaining to the poor lard-encased lads and lassies the reason for their abduction - just before disappearing them off in the night to the Fat Camps and Physical Re-Education Gulags - would be much funnier if played by John Cleese and friends than by the self-important bureaucrats planning to act out the authoritarian roles in real life.