Some
of might have noticed over the last few years that the food you buy
at restaurants has some strange numbers next to your favorite meal.
Those numbers are the calorie count of that meal. Why did McDonald
all of the sudden add the calorie intake to all their menu items. FDA
would be the answer to that question, the FDA is requiring or more
like forcing restaurants with over 20 locations to post the calorie
intake or count of all the items on their menu. This has been done
with the hope that when someone goes to McDonald’s
and sees how many calories are in his favorite item they will cut
back on the food they eat there.
The
FDA and those that are pushing these changes believe that the
government should be the grown-up for tens of millions Americans and
tell them what they should eat, how they should eat, and how much
they should eat. They don’t think this action should be left to the
individual but be put in the hands of the government. They seem to
think that people can’t for themselves that they need a guiding
hand to push them in the right path. I wonder if anyone else feels as
insulted about this as I do. I myself had weight issues about a year
back I also liked to eat at restaurants like McDonalds and
Smash-burger. But I didn’t need the government to tell me that
eating at those restaurants was unhealthy for me. Most people that
eat at those places know it’s not a healthy meal but eat there
because they like the taste of the food. It’s insulting to think
that the American public is too stupid to know that these places sell
unhealthy food. The FDA acts like this is a market failure because
there is a lack of information and that they should try and fix it.
That they know that this new rule will end all the problems of
obesity. But that’s clearly not the case as can be seen in the
results so far, many of the results have shown no change in dietary
habit since the law was enacted. But this shouldn’t be a surprise,
it was never the lack of information about the calorie numbers that
caused people to eat at these places but their preferences.
There
is another issue with all of this from the classical liberal view and
it’s the constant expanding of the federal government and its
blatant theft of property from the restaurant owners.
It cannot be explained in any other manner, if companies are
forced to do something with their property that they don’t want to.
The federal government has taken the property of the restaurant
owners and put their calorie numbers on every single one of them. The
worst part about this is that almost no one seems that concerned
about it, sure some people might not like it or think it’s stupid
but nearly anyone seems to be up in arms that the government just
expanded its powers and force to new highs and blatantly took
property of someone else.
Liberty/classical
liberalism would say or what I think they would say on the matter is
that this is why we need limits on the power of government. That we
should enforce that the role of the government is to protect private
property not to steal it. That we should focus on the individual and
his rights not on some grand theory of what’s the greatest outcome
for the greatest amount of people, that’s bound to fail and end up
hurting many more people then it helps. I think we should look at
what the role of government is and should be in America and focus
more on the rights of individuals rather than on
some collective good, before it’s too late and the government has
taken your property as well, all in the name of the greater good.
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