Do The Obese Have The “Right” To Become More Obese?

In an attempt to help those who cannot help themselves from becoming obese, the government has implemented new legislative fiats requiring restaurants to post the calorie count of each item on their menus.   Unfortunately, the heavy hand of government dictate is producing counter productive results.  Consider the following study showing that forcing restaurants to post calorie information has actually had no beneficial impact but instead, has perversely resulted in consumers consuming more empty calories, not less.

After Calorie Warnings, Diners Order More Calories

Before food czars get any more punch-happy on their own Kool-Aid, they need to be purged of the illusion that their laws are actually working. Last month, New York University and Yale medical professors published a ground-breaking study, which shows that New York City’s law requiring fast food chains to post calories on their menus doesn’t reduce their customers’ caloric intake.

Sixteen municipalities including California, Seattle, and Portland have passed laws similar to NYC’s, and the Menu Education and Labeling Act, which would impose labeling regulations nationwide, is pending in Congress.

But the researchers’ most striking finding was that customers actually ordered more caloric items after the law went into effect than before, despite the fact that nine out of ten customers who reported using the information said they made healthier choices as a result of the law.

But the problem may also be more complex. It’s possible that people who are less educated may actually think they are eating more healthily than they are notwithstanding the calorie numbers staring them in the face.information and that 15% said they used it. But these figures demonstrate the law’s failure—not success. Despite the fact that people were readily presented with

The Department is boasting that 56% of customers saw the caloric the nutritional information, 85% of them ignored it.

The lawmakers who enacted the calorie posting regulations succumbed to the fallacy that everyone thinks like them. They probably reasoned that because they would make healthier choices if presented with nutritional information, everyone else would as well. But maybe what consumers actually want is a delicious meal at a low price.

So what’s the next step for an imperial government gone mad with regulations and micro control over the lives of their disconnected citizens??  You can see the next step coming.  For those of us unable to think properly, based on bureaucratic notions of proper eating habits, the only option left is to impose more draconian rules.  If fat people can’t stop themselves from gorging on food, the next logical legislative fiat would necessarily involve requiring restaurants to forcible eject or refuse to serve those individuals that the government “deems to be obese”.

I wonder how that will work out?

“No Individual Should Face Workplace Discrimination Based on Race”

Part of the appeal of American culture has always been the sense of fair play and equal opportunity offered by our political and economic system.  What has attracted so many immigrants to our shores for hundreds of years was the notion that, given a level playing field, those who worked the hardest could achieve the most.

This system has worked well, creating a vibrant and diverse American culture in which success is largely blind to race.  No system is perfect, of course, but until something better comes along, it has worked well enough to make America’s economic and social system the envy of many other nations.  Fortunately, but by a very slim margin,  common sense ideas of achievement recently prevailed in a Supreme Court ruling on workplace bias.

Justices Rule for White Firemen In Bias Lawsuit

The Supreme Court yesterday restricted how far employers may go in considering race in hiring and promotion decisions, a ruling that puts workplaces across the nation on notice that efforts to combat potential discrimination against one group can amount to actual discrimination against another.

The court ruled for white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., who said city officials violated their rights when it threw out the results of a promotions test on which few minorities scored well. The case drew outsize attention because President Obama’s nominee for the high court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, had been part of a unanimous panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit that endorsed a lower-court ruling upholding New Haven’s decision.

“No individual should face workplace discrimination based on race,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the five-member majority.

The case has been used by Sotomayor critics as evidence that she allowed her personal preferences to influence her rulings

Those who oppose Sotomayor contrasted the court’s 89 pages of opinions, concurrences and dissents with the 134-word summary judgment from Sotomayor and the other judges on the panel. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the Supreme Court’s decision a “victory for evenhanded application of the law” and said that “all nine justices were critical of the trial court opinion that Judge Sotomayor endorsed,” an assertion the White House rejected.

Kennedy said that New Haven’s test — 60 percent of the firefighters’ scores were based on a written test and 40 percent on interviews — properly evaluated what candidates would need to know to perform their jobs, and that it was equally applied to candidates of all races and ethnic backgrounds.

“The process was open and fair,” he said. “The problem, of course, is that after the tests were completed, the raw racial results became the predominant rationale for the city’s refusal to certify the results.”

More On This Topic
On Race, The Slog Goes On - George Will

Although New Haven’s firefighters deservedly won in the Supreme Court, it is deeply depressing that they won narrowly — 5 to 4. The egregious behavior by that city’s government, in a context of racial rabble-rousing, did not seem legally suspect to even one of the court’s four liberals, whose harmony seemed to reflect result-oriented rather than law-driven reasoning.

A recent poll of Americans under 30 revealed that one third expressed a preference for socialism.  The educational and income  characteristics of those polled was not detailed so like every poll, the results can be interpreted differently.

I suspect, however,  that those polled construed the meaning of socialism to be  “sharing the wealth, regardless of effort or abilities”.  An income sharing arrangement of this type would, of course,  be most strongly embraced by those who have the least wealth, for whatever reason.

Do the poll results imply that one third of Americans under 30 cannot envision themselves being able to achieve success that the free enterprise system allows?   To  resign oneself to failure at such a young age implies either a belief in a very bleak economic future or a total lack of faith and optimism in one’s own abilities.

Winston Churchill summed it up perfectly when he said,

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

Some Thoughts On The  Wealth Of A Nation

With a democratic super majority now ruling the country with visions of sharing the wealth, is it possible or wise to attempt to make  all people “equal”?   Endeavors to create total economic equality have never been successful in human history - would such an attempt now represent an extreme arrogance that results in less liberty for all?

In a stimulating discussion of the proper role of government, Cris Sheridan of Financial Sense raises the following issues.

If we could distill political science and economics down to a single main goal it would really be one thing: how to achieve the most efficient allocation of resources to a society. How does a society do this?

Utilitarianism is often understood as the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Since, in economic terms, “good” refers to prosperity or wealth, it is often argued that there is an inefficient allocation of resources when someone has a dramatically higher income than another in society, especially when the latter is severely poor and doesn’t have access to the same resources like health care.

The biggest problem with utilitarianism is that it will only work in the short-run for the following reasons: 1) high income earners will work less as their incentive for working is reduced, 2) they will have less income reserved for savings and investment, which is used as financial capital for the economy, and 3) they will often find means of either hiding or removing their wealth from the state and move all or part of their capital to a more tax-friendly environment.

So what is the alternative to the utilitarian approach then? Well, as the quote from F.A. Hayek says, “there is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.”

Negotiating the balance between the rights of an individual and not attempting to obstruct the free-market forces that allow for the proportionate allocation of resources falls into a discussion of two main categories: 1) differences in what distinguishes a right from a privilege and 2) what is considered proportionate. This, I must admit, is really what the debate is all about.

The question I leave with you today is, will the government become so overwhelmed by its liabilities and demand a burden so great from its future citizens that private property and personal liberty fall from a discussion of the latter category into the former. When that happens, and will if we don’t change our course, our Constitution and the pillars of what made this great nation are collapsed.

Entire article is worth the read .

More on this topic:

33 percent of Americans under age 30 prefer socialism and 30 percent are undecided - (these are the guys who slept  in history class and still don’t know about the economic collapse of the USSR).