FDA to propose new food labels

Come on, Ragu. You know the answer to this. You're the most economically erudite person on this board. Collective action problem. No individual is incentivized enough to demand this on his or her own. Nor does a single individual have the power to do so. Also asymmetry of information. You can't demand what you don't know is bad for you.

And your argument against sugar labeling is terrible. They used to say fats were bad? OK. So, therefore, all further research into nutrition, by scientists, is rendered useless? This is the global cooling argument, redux. It's terrible. People used to think the earth was flat. Then they said it's round. And even though they were wrong before, I tend to believe them this time.

 

According to the research behind this, the $2 billion it costs to implement the program will return $30 billion in health cost savings.

Is your opposition based simply upon your rock-ribbed libertarian principles? Or are you swayed at all by a hypothetical efficiency argument?

 

There should be no restrictions or warnings about smoking. If people want to know about the product, they should just call the tobacco company.

 

Not being fucking poisoned by our food should be a fucking given, not something we specifically have to ask for in order to make it happen.

 

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/19/ayn_rand_is_for_children/

 

Yeah, after I've made a few hundred million on tainted chips, I'll run away to some desert island and your legal system will never touch me.

So much for the system libertarianism designed.

 

The fact that you consider the tobacco issue of the last 50 years to be one of fraud and civil liability, and not one of public health, tells us everything we need to know about you in this conversation. And based on what you're saying here, I can only conclude that if we were sitting in 1966, you would have been dead set against a warning on tobacco products, because there is all kinds of information you COULD have on a carton of cigarettes and why pick out only that one thing? The scientific conclusions were still being argued vehemently by the industry (which I'm sure you were happy to let self-regulate) and by their buddies in Congress well into the 1990s.

Under your line of reasoning, there is virtually no law in the United States that should exist.

--Why should McDonald's be required to sell salmonella-free food? If enough die from food poisoning, the populace will just go to Burger King instead. And lawsuits!

--Why should used-car dealers be prohibited from rolling back the odometer? When enough people realize the dealer's cars suck, the dealer will surely go out of business. And those people should be popping the odometer out and checking it before purchase anyway.

--Why do we need laws for the proper disposal of paint? After Sherwin-Williams ruins the water in an entire region or is caught filling tankers and dropping its waste out in the ocean, consumers will rise up and put them out of business, and that's that.

There is plenty of evidence from Europe that regulating certain foods greatly improves public health. But since that interferes with capitalism, fuck it.

You're always about the unintended consequences, including with that pithy little quote you posted. You should spend some time thinking about what the world would look like if you actually got your way.

 

It won't help. Libertarianism is a brain disease for which no cure is known. Fortunately, the sufferer can still live a mostly normal life, as the most serious symptoms are a complete inability to influence elections and a slight chance of losing your life savings in a Bitcoin scam.

 

Being in favor of increased civil liberties is one thing.

Supporting companies' rights to be free of laws against serving poison or other harmful ingredients as a matter of practice is something else entirely.