Do you think that meat costs a lot at the grocery store now? It just may get still more expensive, thanks to your government.

Jayson Lusk, a professor of economics at Oklahoma State University, writes in the Wall Street Journal that it is now a fashionable idea among some of the more extreme environmentalists that people should be made to become vegetarian. The claim is that raising livestock, which they do not like, just happens to be destructive. But they may not limit themselves to trying to persuade you, writes Lusk:

“Each to his own, you might say. But these ideas are working their way into government policy proposals. For example, Angela Tagtow, a self-described ‘environmental nutritionist’ formerly with the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, was recently tapped to head the U.S. Department of Agriculture's effort to revise federal dietary guidelines. This is a sign that the new recommendations are likely to go beyond nutritional science to incorporate environmental considerations. Many observers believe that meat will be specifically targeted for scrutiny.

“Environmental nutritionists argue that the social and environmental costs of meat production—obesity, chronic disease, the production of green-house gases such as methane, etc.—are not reflected in prices at the grocery store or restaurant. ‘The big-ticket externalities are carbon generation and obesity,’ New York Times columnist Mark Bittman recently wrote. He argues that beef prices don't reflect these externalities and that ‘industrial food has manipulated cheap prices for excess profit at excess cost to everyone.’

“That the price of meat is too low might come as news to food consumers who, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, paid 14% higher prices for ground beef this June than they did in June 2013 and 29% more than two years ago. Recent droughts and high corn prices—due in part to Washington's support for ethanol—are largely to blame. It is unclear how high prices must rise to overcome the view that meat is ‘too cheap.’ Some industry critics have even called for new ‘meat taxes’ to discourage consumption.”

You can’t visit many county fairs or the Wisconsin State Fair without realizing that many Wisconsinites make a living providing meat that Americans want to eat. Our farmers grow it. Our workers turn it into bacon or bratwurst. They all do it with incredible efficiency – which is why critics claim that meat is somehow “too cheap.” The livestock are grown on farms Wisconsinites own and care for, land that often has been in their families for generations. The idea that they are abusing that land by feeding the country and that government must intervene to make meat less affordable is arrogant folly.

And the idea that government should be able to use taxes and regulations to make its citizens avoid the wholesome foods they prefer is repulsive.