By Leo Brown
[President Obama's Weekly Address]
A few minutes ago, I tweeted that the government can have some of my rights back, because I don't want them anymore.
I was tweeting about my unencumbered right to run, or even patronize, a fast food chain. As of now, any deft entrepreneur is free to purvey addictive poison to our confused, vulnerable citizenry. We don't need this right.
The "slippery slope" argument comes to mind. Sure, the world would be better off without McDonald's, but do we really want to go that route? Heavy-handed government control of the free market? A command economy? Sounds awfully red. And look at what happened during Prohibition, our infamous attempt to eliminate alcohol consumption. Everyone knows that Prohibition was a failure.
But if the same thing happens to Prohibition 2.0 and we become a nation of fast food moonshiners? That would be great! In fact, that would be the point. Unlike the Noble Experiment, I'm not suggesting that we mandate what people consume. Rather, we need to manipulate access in order to curb fast food's current plague status. If people want to concoct something like a Big Mac at home, more power to them.
Furthermore, by passing a thorough, unambiguous law, there would be no need to dissemble McDonald's and the other giants. They could be preserved as economic engines and symbols of American prosperity. They would simply be required to restructure and meet serious quality standards. Meal prices would rise, and the poor who wrongly believe that fast food is their cheapest option would discover frozen vegetables and rotisserie chicken in the grocery store.
In his weekly address, President Obama beseeches Republicans in Congress to authorize the creation of a consumer watchdog agency. The goal is to prevent slick, powerful interests from taking advantage of uninformed consumers who are too busy managing their personal lives to do the necessary digging. Senator Lindsey Graham has led the Republican opposition, denouncing the proposal as "something out of the Stalinist Era."
Is it just me, or are some of our liberties causing more trouble for the country than they're worth? What are we even trying to protect anymore? Hopefully, America isn't too drunk on its own ideology to notice some of the cruel, unnecessary consequences.
What would have happened if prohibition allowed "home brew" but not sale of alcohol. We'd all have become expert brewers!
ReplyDeleteSimilar to your proposal, if a big mac is necessary, brew the magic at home!
I like it!
I agree that poor people who think fast food is their cheapest option are wrong, but often fast food still is their most accessible option due to constraints of public transportation. The US has a huge problem with food deserts because large supermarkets don't want to put stores in "bad neighborhoods" (= poor neighborhoods) with high levels of theft. We need to address that problem before we start talking about how to restrict access to McDonald's.
ReplyDeleteFood deserts are a problem, but wouldn't they be less of a problem if McDonald's were held to higher nutritional standards? I don't agree that we need to wait until supermarkets are somehow convinced or forced to serve underprivileged neighborhoods to crack down on the sale of poison-food. Yes, meal prices would rise, but this would not be such a problem, because clearly, the obese poor are not in need of as many calories as they currently consume.
ReplyDeleteI don't mean to diminish or disregard the problem of access to supermarkets, but I think the Bittman piece that I link to above makes a good case that the issue is somewhat overblown. While some people truly have no access to markets, most Americans drive cars or have access to public transportation. So a distance of one mile - the typical measure of an urban food desert - definitely can't explain the magnitude of our obesity epidemic.
I also don't mean to say that the food desert problem can be solved by simply reinventing McDonald's. Of course, people should have access to a supermarket with fresh or frozen unprocessed foods, and this will probably require government action. Perhaps some sort of theft insurance program would be a useful step. But in my opinion, we can address this problem while concurrently building some inconvenience into the system that enables so many Americans to pick up their family dinner at the drive-thru.