Take a deep breath; hold it. Now exhale directly into the mouthpiece. Good. Now let's see: You hit 4.5 on Environment Canada's new Individual Carbon Polluter Exhaler, just a little above average. That means your Personal Carbon Pollution Tax for the year 2006 is $155.70. Your two children don't contribute much yet, but under the federal government's innovative Reverse Child Carbon Tax Credit, designed to capture the future carbon burden their breathing will impose on the atmosphere and the health of the planet, there's a flat $50 tax for each child.

We haven't come to that yet, but we might some day. One scientist estimated human respiration probably contributes as much as deforestation to the annual load of man-made carbon in the atmosphere. Throw in animals, and the carbon count rises dramatically. Carbon dioxide is as natural and wholesome a gas as you can find -- plants exist on it and humans exhale it. But throughout the world today carbon dioxide is an "emission." George W. Bush came close to declaring carbon dioxide a pollutant, a move that would have given government agencies wide new power to regulate. Over at The Globe and Mail, the paper's editorial board routinely claims global warming is caused by the pollution of carbon dioxide.

Seriously, though, nobody would think of taxing individuals for breathing. But why not? Look how far the war on smoking has gone. The original objective of getting people to quit smoking has turned into a bullying crusade of exorbitant taxes, police-state regulation and harassment of individuals who are merely exercising their right to breathe something other than air. When attempts to stop smokers ran up against the obvious argument that people have a right to do what they want with their own bodies, the health fascists created the second-hand smoke scare. Smokers don't just harm themselves; they kill other people.

As the anti-smoking fascists gained through the 1980s and 1990s, some of us were laughed at for warning that tobacco was just the beginning. If governments can regulate tobacco as part of public health policy, then they could regulate just about anything humans do. Alcohol would be an obvious target, although the history of Prohibition might discourage action. The new frontier would almost certainly be food. A prime target would likely be something like fat, beef or fast foods.

Not possible, they said in the 1980s. But in recent years the same pseudo-scientific studies and the same arguments that were used to create the anti-smoking crusade are now being used against food and obesity. In 1999, the Canadian Medical Association Journal published a study titled "The cost of obesity in Canada." The direct total cost of obesity in 1997 was estimated at more than $1.8-billion. "The burden of obesity," the researchers said, must be overcome to preserve the limited resources of the health care system.

The tyranny of public health knows no limits. In a CBC Radio commentary this week, Victoria doctor Martin Collis called on Ottawa to impose a GST on fast foods to make people pay for the alleged health costs of their unhealthy eating habits. The Globe and Mail, which has taken up health fascism as a crusade, set the cost of obesity at $3.1-billion a year and 21,000 lives. It entertained taxes but appeared to stop short of compulsory exercise.

Mandatory fitness appears to be more to the liking of Allan Rock, the Health Minister. Speaking at a fitness show last year, Mr. Rock said, "There's a real business case to be made for more activity in the workplace, for employers working with their workforce to make sure they have a chance to build healthy living and activity into their work days." The level of inactivity among Canadians is "dangerously high," he said. To Rock's credit, though, Ottawa did scrap Participaction Canada, a sclerotic organization founded on a 1960s myth that the average 90-year-old Swede was fitter than the average Canadian.

But the pernicious business of social engineering, which has a dark history back through Nazism, Stalinism and beyond, is obviously far from dead. It is dangerously and hilariously alive. Here are the barbecued meat guidelines from The American Institute for Cancer Research: Start with a piece of meat about the size of a "deck of cards"; trim all fat off beef and skin from chicken; avoid ribs and sausages; marinade in a low-fat product; to avoid flare-ups, cover the grill with aluminum foil; turn foods often; trim off all charred portions before serving. Alternative recipe: Throw the toxic meat directly into the garbage; drink the marinade.

In his book, The Nazi War on Cancer, Robert Proctor tells of a 1930s Hitler Youth manual, Health Through Proper Eating. It warned of the dangers of meat and urged young Germans to eat soy products and high-fibre grains. Nutrition, it said, is "not a private matter" because everybody has "a duty to be healthy." The Nazi motivation was simple: Healthy bodies provide healthy citizens and soldiers. Today, we all have a duty to be healthy to save the public health-care system. Even our breathing will be a problem. It's not a private matter.