The Next Crusade

Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City and self-appointed nanny of its more irresponsible residents, famously failed to impose a limit on the serving size of sugary beverages that restaurants and convenience stores could offer. He succeeded, however, in mandating that chain restaurants print calorie counts for all their offerings on their menus. Presumably, by informing consumers precisely how fattening a double chocolatey chip frappuccino is (520 calories), the subset of consumers who are fat and eat unhealthily would be inspired (shamed?) to select less fattening options.

As news that the FDA is planning to impose such a requirement nationwide spreads, we are also learning that this mandate isn’t working. Apparently, the people most likely to alter their choices based on this information are the people who are already paying attention to their weight and to what they eat. The folks this mandate was intended to help, i.e. those whose fatness and poor eating habits put them at the greatest health risk, either don’t notice at all or don’t care when they do. In retrospect, it seems a bit silly to presume that fat people don’t understand the source of their fatness. If you drink five milkshakes a day, and you find yourself buying larger pants every month or two, do others really believe you are incapable of linking one to the other? Do people really believe that other people are unaware of their fatness? Is that the mechanism that’s at work, a mechanism that’s addressable simply with the dissemination of calorie counts?

Or is there something else at work? Consider that the issue of obesity and poor eating habits is most prevalent in the poorest economic strata. Columnist Naomi Schaefer Riley, who wrote about this issue in today’s New York Post, presented a quote by George Orwell:

the peculiar evil is this: that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food … When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘˜tasty.’

This observation has long been echoed by a friend of mine who has three decades experience as a paramedic on the streets of New York City. He’s noted that the homeless drunks and drug users continue to engage in their destructive vices because therein lies the only pleasure they can manage to get in their lives. The novelist John Mortimer opined:

There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.

In other words, many will prioritize current gratification and pleasure over the less immediately tangible benefit of restraint, especially if the options for current gratification are limited.

Those who respect liberty accept that not everyone will exercise liberty in the same way, or with the same goals in mind, or in a fashion that’s best for them (“best” often being in the eye of the beholder). Those who have less respect, on the other hand, have no problem denying others the gratifications they feel unwise or counterproductive. “For their own good,” presumably… but hold that thought for a moment.

Some will argue that there’s nothing wrong with ensuring those consumers who want information have easy access to it. They don’t want to trust the free market to provide that information, so they use government to mandate that which might not be in high demand and presume that the imposition is of no consequence. Yet, there are consequences. One lies in the cost of such a mandate, which is passed onto consumers. Another is that the mandate complicates and can deter the offering of new products by adding an extra step to the process. These aren’t a big deal for big chains, because their offerings are limited and they have thousands of locations across which to amortize costs. The real problem lies in the “what’s next” category.

It is an inescapable reality that meddlers, nannies, “social justice warriors” and their ilk don’t pack their bags and go home after a battle – whether they win or lose. Successes encourage similar efforts, failures encourage alternate efforts. Herein lies the peril from accepting the minor infringement that is menu labeling. Analytical evidence that it doesn’t work will be dismissed or ignored, meaning that the mandate won’t be repealed. But, when the evidence of failure becomes obvious i.e. fat people continue to walk among us, the nannies will try something else.

The labeling mandate doesn’t stand alone – it is not a one-off bit of nannying. Another notorious bit is the ban on trans-fats imposed by some cities and municipalities, but it’s just one of thousands of regulations and restrictions on what we eat and drink. Yet, despite all the efforts by the meddling intelligentsia to fight the obesity “epidemic,” the nation, especially the poorer subset, remains fat. There is much blame to be hung on the government itself for this reality, but that’s a topic for another day. The more germane question is, as noted above, “what’s next.”

No one should expect the government to give up its efforts to actively fight the so-called obesity epidemic when the labeling mandate doesn’t work as intended. As is so often the case with statist efforts, failure is considered a sign of insufficiency rather than bad theory. If labeling doesn’t cajole people into eating healthier, stronger actions must be taken. Thus the effort at limiting the size of sugary beverages – another effort that won’t work. For the reasons noted earlier, believing that information and encouragement will be sufficient to change fat people’s ways is detached from reality. Thus, we should expect that, at some point, information and encouragement will give way to force. That is, after all, what statists do when they don’t get their way. How, exactly, government will force people to eat less and eat healthier? It remains to be seen, but thinking it’ll never happen is tantamount to ignoring history.

Already, the groundwork is being laid for justifying that use of force. Already, government has assumed for itself the responsibility for ensuring the availability of health care for everyone. Emergency rooms are mandated to treat all comers and Medicaid and other programs are available for the poor. More recently, the Affordable Care Act has expanded government’s involvement in health care and health insurance even further, and none of us should be surprised when the failures of ACA prompt the statists and nannies to push for “single-payer,” i.e. socialized medicine.

While it hasn’t happened yet, the pressures placed by a “reckless and irresponsible” subset of fat people on public finances will prompt those in power to start exploring ways to make fat people less-fat, even against their will. This will be justified by “we’re paying for your health care so we have the right to control what you eat.” Today, this sounds extreme, and many will dismiss it as libertarian paranoia. The sentiment, however, can be found all over political message boards, especially in discussions about drug legalization. “I don’t want to pay for their health care after they wreck their lives with narcotics” isn’t far removed from “Why should I pay for their health care because they eat four Big Mac Value Meals a day?”

Contained in that sentiment is the real reason that nannies look to control how the rest of us eat. While some truly believe they’re looking out for the fat “for their own good,” many others hide their real motivation i.e. “for everyone else’s good.” The assumption of responsibility for the cost health care by the public sector enables people to shirk responsibility for the consequences of poor dietary choices, and the removal of that corrective market force fosters even greater irresponsibility. While it would seem logical to seek to undo the actions that produced this undesirable result, it’s politically difficult to reintroduce responsibility that has been removed. Instead, other approaches to “fixing” the obesity problem (i.e. reducing the burden that fat people’s poor health puts on public finances) will be pursued.

Those approaches won’t be limited in their focus to only the culprits i.e. the obese. Like so much else that government does, restrictions will be universal, meaning that even the Crossfit fanatic with 5% body fat will find his liberty infringed. The nanny state already restricts a long list of foods in the name of public health. In addition to the aforementioned trans-fat ban, there are restrictions or bans on raw milk, certain cheeses, and a long list of foods that are eaten in other nations. It’s not that much of a stretch to redefine “public health” to cover not just things that are unhealthy, but things that are too calorically dense.

It may not happen next week or next year, but the inevitable failure of nationwide menu labeling will spur more overt and drastic action. Crusaders don’t give up just because people don’t want to listen to them. Your liberty means nothing in the face of their righteousness.