YOU are a chemical process. Not a person in pursuit of happiness, just chemicals agglomerated at birth and dissipated at death. You exist, according to your health ministry, to perpetuate the process. It hates the fact that you might be happy. Pleasure without “nutritional value” is taboo. You must have a long, miserable life.

Tax on sugar-sweetened beverages is the bitter-sweet flavour of the month. Initially, only fat people will be taxed. Other sugar sources — sugared tea and coffee, sweets, cakes, wine and spirits, bread, rice and potatoes, salad dressing, sauces and pastes, fruit juice and flavoured water, preservatives and flavourings — will follow.

Sugar-sweetened beverages tax is just the start. You are also not allowed to like fatty meat, dairy products, salted crisps and nuts, fine wine, greasy breakfasts or fast food. No matter what you eat, if you eat enough to be overweight, your lifestyle will join the falling dominoes of liberty. Our ministry is shameless about goose-stepping us towards lifestyle nationalisation. They want everything banned that does not perpetuate you at the expense of happiness or liberty. When challenged, they are bewildered rabbits in headlights.

During a debate, a departmental spokesman dismissed our Constitution’s first provision, which guarantees the right to dignity and the “enjoyment” of freedom, by misrepresenting section 27 (the podcast is on the ClassicFM website). He repeated the health fanatic mantra that section 27 guarantees health, when he and his colleagues know the section in fact guarantees the right to “healthcare”. En route to section 27, authoritarians who ignore section 1(a) pass section 10, which guarantees “the right to have … dignity respected and protected”.

On TV, Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi called the Free Market Foundation “clowns” for raising civil liberty and constitutional concerns. Health propaganda clowns, on the other hand, are no laughing matter. Lifestyle authoritarianism is justified because their failed healthcare system cannot cope with the alleged effects of smoking, drinking, eating and relaxing. When they accuse corporate, small business and civil society critics of “putting profits before people” three fingers point back at them.

They seem to believe the myth that health-care costs exceed revenue from bad habits. If sugar-sweetened beverages and other sinners really have reduced life expectancy, instead of imposing costs, they subsidise healthy living thrice over through taxes on what they consume, avoidance of old-age health-care costs and foreshortened pension claims. The causes and economics of ill-health are more complex than simplistic sugar tax arguments acknowledge.

Sugar-sweetened beverages tax discriminates regressively against the poor by disproportionately stripping them of income. The Department of Health admits that the tax will not affect the rich. Its spokesman warned that if the poor continue enjoying sugar-sweetened beverages, their tax will be increased until it hurts. By discriminating against people with a genetic “sweet tooth” or “eating disorder”, the tax is indistinguishable from racism and sexism.

The culmination of small erosions of basic rights is terrifying. When smokers who do not impose their smoke on others were attacked, antismokers rejoiced. Now that their turn has come, they have no principled defence.

If sugar-sweetened beverage tax reduces consumption as promised, it will add no more than a few minutes or hours to life expectancy. The myth that sugar has no nutritional value implies the legitimacy of taxing nearly everything presumed unhealthy.

Watching TV, reading and sitting have no nutritional value. Unless we stop this madness TV, book and chair taxes will soon force us to walk and stand while we eat flavourless food.

• Louw is executive director of the Free Market Foundation.