The Food, the Fat, and the Ugly http://www.lewrockwell.com/decoster/decoster67.html by Karen De Coster
The latest outrage in America is the fight against fat and
the "capitalist swines" that produce and market such sin. After all,
fat taxes are in the offing as the ultimate spanking in the direction
of those consumers who choose twinkies or potato chips over
government-approved bird seed. The politically correct food fascists,
from D.C. and elsewhere, are even trumpeting studies that prove
American children to be fat instead of fit. And Caesar Barber, fatso
extraordinaire, is going to make the junk food producers pay.
Mr. Barber, while naming Burger King, McDonald's, Wendy's, and KFC as
defendants in his legal grievance against his own sagging waistline
and wilting health, has rejuvenated the anti-capitalist outgrowth
amongst the it-aint-our-fault crowd. This time, the malicious
perpetrators appear to be the beastly marketing types who have the
nerve to make their products appealing to the masses. And the
consuming masses, along with Mr. Barber, cant possibly be held
responsible for their own actions.
Mr. Barber claims he is fat and unhealthy and it is a lifetime junk
food habit that is to blame. Barber and his speculator lawyer, Samuel
Hirsch, base this notion of no accountability on the fact that
ignorant consumers need perpetual warning of the possible consequences
of digesting fast food-type chow. Mr. Barbers obesity, high blood
pressure, diabetes, heart disease, and cholesterol are, according to
Hirsch, the result of deception on the part of greedy moneymakers.
Therefore, Hirsch seeks a class-action lawsuit with compensatory
damages.
Are we not yet sick of these shyster lawyers and their court scams?
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is applauding this
legal action, and in fact, its spokesman, Dr. Neal D. Barnard, holds
the fast food industry accountable for Americas "diet-related
epidemics." Even granting that fast food necessarily begets ill
health, one must set aside the causal factors and instead focus
instead on deliberate human action.
Humans, after all, act to make specific choices. These choices are
purposeful in aiming at securing certain ends. The ends we humans
drive at ultimately aim at happiness, because such a state has managed
to alleviate some set of uncertainties in our lives. Human action,
then, is at the core of economic decision-making. The act of eating is
quite often an economic decision. Not only is cost an issue, but time
preference the degree of preferring present satisfaction to future
satisfaction is, quite typically, very high among those that are too
lazy to take care of their immediate physical condition.
Eating when we are hungry is a happy thing. It may be blatant laziness
or just plain happiness that makes individuals choose quick and easy
food in the first place. Lets admit it, even owing to him being too
lethargic to steer away from easy food, every time Mr. Barber walks
into a McDonalds, he has a choice between Big Macs and salads, or
between fries and fruit yogurt. He likes the burgers and fries because
they smell yummy and look juicy, while the salad or healthy yogurt
looks bland and tasteless. So Mr. Barber chooses to stuff his face
with that which he makes a direct choice to consume. He eats what
makes him happy. The yogurt will not make him happy.
Am I missing something here?
Also, taking the time to prepare meals through the means of choosing a
recipe, shopping for ingredients, making the meal, and cleaning up
afterwards can often impose tremendous opportunity costs on an
individual. They miss out on the opportunity to be doing something
else they consider important. After all, the time spent preparing food
can be time gloriously spent not exercising, for goodness sakes.
A guy like Mr. Barber purports that he has no responsibility
whatsoever to inform himself on matters pertaining to his own body.
Nor is he under any code of responsibility for weighing his high time
preference against the likely consequences of negligent choices. The
producers of fatty foods, according to his charges, shall be
responsible for guiding individuals through the motions of
decision-making.
However, its tough to fight the common sense notion of eating. We know
we should not eat too many calories or too much in the way of fat or
carbohydrates because they all cause fat to accumulate in the body,
and fat causes blood pressure, cholesterol, and heart blockage
problems, and those problems cause unhappiness. Death can be an
unhappy thing, after all.
But its Mr. Barber who wanted the immediate happiness for all these
years, and now that the price of instant gratification has come to
bear upon him, he wants to turn the tables of responsibility onto the
producers of fatty foods?
Previous court tomfoolery has shown us that hot McDonalds coffee
balanced on ones lap can be traced back to corporate culpability, yet
the notion of individual stupidity never entered that legal fray. As
to Caesar Barber, I say that a man who ignores the wealth of
information available to him and shrugs off the virtue of exercise has
bought his own ticket to the flab farm.
And of course, the court and its associated costs is a public good
which Mr. Barber can use to his hearts content. He will incur little
if any costs as the defendants and the taxpaying public foot the bill
for yet another case of individual idiocy.
In a further attempt at the absurd, on a recent MSNBC interview, both
Barber and his lawyer attempted to make his case a racism issue by
charging that the fast food industry is aggressively marketing its
evils toward minorities, specifically in minority neighborhoods. This,
they hinted, was a plot to suck in all of the poor minorities that
are, apparently, less capable of making buying decisions than
non-minorities. But when major pizza chains and other food business do
not locate in high-crime minority areas, the racism charges therein
are rampant and unforgiving.
The charge of wickedness in advertising is preposterous and is rooted
deeply in an anti-capitalistic mentality. The Leftist economist
Kenneth Galbraith has said that advertising is the villain that
creates artificial wants that heretofore did not exist. The
Galbraithian view, one that is reasserting its popularity, is that all
consumers actually have a tendency toward life at a bare subsistence
level; that without businesses preying on consumer weaknesses,
individuals dont desire products that make them happy or affluent.
And Mr. Barber, I suppose, never truly desired the latest Wendys
triple-decker or McDonalds value meal. It was all coercive marketing
that swayed his otherwise prudent sensibilities. Without such
bullying, we are to deduce that hed rather have shopped for and cooked
some far healthier meals.
This legal mockery is just a small fraction of the war against free
enterprise, and with it comes the usual blame games to excuse the lack
of individual accountability in society nowadays. It appears that a
persons lack of physical activity, genetic make-up, and insatiable
appetites for instant happiness can never be the culprit in a blame
society.
August 9, 2002
Karen De Coster, CPA, [[4]send her mail] is a
paleolibertarian freelance writer, graduate student in Austrian
Economics, and a business professional from Michigan. Her first book
is currently in the works. See her [5]Mises Institute archive for more
online articles, and check out [6]her websitewww.karendecoster.com>,
along with [7]her blog.
[8]Karen De Coster Archives
4. mailto:OldRightWingGal at yahoo.com
5. http://www.mises.org/articles.asp?mode=a&author=De+Coster
6. http://www.karendecoster.com/
7. http://www.karendecoster.com/blog.html
8. http://www.lewrockwell.com/decoster/decoster-arch.html
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