Comments on: The War on Obesity http://www.rlc.org/the-war-on-obesity/ The Conscience of the Republican Party Fri, 26 Apr 2013 21:19:07 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Dan Sheill http://www.rlc.org/the-war-on-obesity/comment-page-1/#comment-20638 Dan Sheill Wed, 03 Aug 2011 02:51:00 +0000 http://www.rlc.org/?p=5497#comment-20638 "The cries for government action to combat the obesity crisis assumes both that Americans are too foolish to practice restraint and that private advocacy groups are too incompetent to educate consumers on the perks of healthy living." Freedom requires personal responsibility. And the fact that the obesity rates have doubled over the last 30 years is a mere illustration that less Americans have the impulse control that represents the kind of self-reliance that once made this country great. So yes, many Americans today are too foolish to practice restraint. There is nothing wrong with private efforts like Jack in the Box to further this cause because people don't have to eat at Jacks. But unless you renounce your citizenship, you have no choice but to succumb to the Federal Government's jurisdiction. And their one-size fits all solutions, whether it be for finance or health care, are often more disastrous than the original problem they sought to remedy. Take alcohol. To pretend that America didn't have a drinking problem in the earliest 20th Century is to essentially have your head stuck in the historical sand. But because individual people often lacked the will power to go through life without alcohol, human nature and Murphy's law dictated that prohibition would have unintended consequences, like helping murderous thugs like Al Capone rise to power. Government's can't protect us from our vices and personal stupidity. But to pretend that Americans today don't have a problem with ignorance and stupidity (whether it is represented through a lack of nutritional education or financial education that ultimately helped cause the financial crisis) is simply being in denial. Unless more Americans are willing to change back to a culture of self-reliance, we will end up with a nation of over-weight, underwater mortgaged morons who ultimately won't be able to cover all of the costs that they incur on the rest of society. And this in turn results in another government "bailout," ill-tailored and too late in its proposed remedy, which forces the rest of us to pay for the failings of others. Ideally, we'd simply let these people fail on their own, but we don't currently live in this kind of society because of the same weak-minded thinking that results in people looking like this: “The cries for government action to combat the obesity crisis assumes both that Americans are too foolish to practice restraint and that private advocacy groups are too incompetent to educate consumers on the perks of healthy living.”

Freedom requires personal responsibility. And the fact that the obesity rates have doubled over the last 30 years is a mere illustration that less Americans have the impulse control that represents the kind of self-reliance that once made this country great. So yes, many Americans today are too foolish to practice restraint. There is nothing wrong with private efforts like Jack in the Box to further this cause because people don’t have to eat at Jacks. But unless you renounce your citizenship, you have no choice but to succumb to the Federal Government’s jurisdiction. And their one-size fits all solutions, whether it be for finance or health care, are often more disastrous than the original problem they sought to remedy.

Take alcohol. To pretend that America didn’t have a drinking problem in the earliest 20th Century is to essentially have your head stuck in the historical sand. But because individual people often lacked the will power to go through life without alcohol, human nature and Murphy’s law dictated that prohibition would have unintended consequences, like helping murderous thugs like Al Capone rise to power. Government’s can’t protect us from our vices and personal stupidity. But to pretend that Americans today don’t have a problem with ignorance and stupidity (whether it is represented through a lack of nutritional education or financial education that ultimately helped cause the financial crisis) is simply being in denial.

Unless more Americans are willing to change back to a culture of self-reliance, we will end up with a nation of over-weight, underwater mortgaged morons who ultimately won’t be able to cover all of the costs that they incur on the rest of society. And this in turn results in another government “bailout,” ill-tailored and too late in its proposed remedy, which forces the rest of us to pay for the failings of others. Ideally, we’d simply let these people fail on their own, but we don’t currently live in this kind of society because of the same weak-minded thinking that results in people looking like this:

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