Alliance Gets Posted

The NY Post has given us a nice forum for our commentary on the fast food hypocrisy down at the DOH. Remember these are the same folks who were inveighing against sugary soda while keeping a soda vending machine humming away down in the agency lobby. Our piece tries to highlight the gap between theory and practice-and the need to persuade people rather than regulate and mandate businesses with self-defeating and expensive rules.

This philosophy, however-education rather than regulation-takes a little too much time for health bureaucrats who are impatient for quick results, so we get the failed menu labeling experiment that has led to fast food customers consuming more, rather than less calories, at their meals. We had predicted failure here, because there had been no data produced beforehand to indicate that the use of calorie posting would be effective-only the ideological animus from the folks at the Center for Science in the Public Interest acting as a prompt for the expensive meddling in the fast food businesses of NYC.

All of this is a cautionary tale, one that underscores the dangers that may lie ahead if a truly national health plan is ever enacted. Once the government is in charge-and every one's health care is being paid for by the tax payers-the sense of bureaucratic entitlement will go off the charts. And it won't be long before every one's behavior is monitored-and sanctioned-by government mandates of one kind or another,

If the government becomes responsible for every one's care, there will no longer be any such thing as individual rights and personal responsibility. If your being fat costs me money, you are going to have to exercise and eat right-or pay a lot extra for your indolence and poor eating choices. Should this ever become our reality, the scope of individual liberty will have been narrowed to such an extent, that it would be unrecognizable.