If the government, meaning me and you, weren't going to end up paying, I guess I wouldn't care as much if adults make poor choices- but children really are a responsibility for us all.
Corporations make money marketing to children, getting them to make poor choices- it's kind of like breastfeeding really. There are you, over in a corner, with your carrots and celery (or your information on breastfeeding), while the corporations own the room with their candy, soda and high fat zero nutrition snacks- and those snacks are available at every vending machine. That's a problem.
Brilliant people, thousands and thousands of them, go in to marketing and advertising. We know it works, because they do studies on what works. On the other side of the ring you have the people working in public interest...
I don't want laws to make people eat right, I'm just not that much of a busybody- but I do want all the non-coercive action, that makes sense, that we can have (and by makes sense, I mean I want results- a la Freakonomics- if something works, then I say use it, if it doesn't, not matter how nice it sounds, throw it out). The rate of change wrt obesity is so huge (pun intended), that I really think it rises to the level of a threat to our national productivity, since recent studies confirm that obese people are ill more, more prone to disability, and that they take a lot more days off.
Because of the way our society is structured, we already have a lot of busybodies in the marketplace. Every advertiser is a busybody, using marketing to get in your brain and your life, trying to make you do something. Granted, they are private busybodies on the public airwaves, but considering the size of many multinational corporations, they're really the size of small countries. So I don't see a huge problem in using the resources of the government to combat some of the more pernicious advertising wrt health. |
