Brits School Yanks on Markets
Thursday, December 07, 2006
In Britain, a McDonald's restaurant closed for lack of business in a particularly health-conscious area.
McDonald's is closing its outlet in a town known for quality food and healthy, local produce.Memo to New York City: People can make intelligent health decisions and needn't have their choices forcibly removed for "their own good".
The fast food chain in Tavistock, Devon, simply wasn't being used enough by locals.
So after seven years struggling to make ends meet in a town that has won many accolades for the quality of its food, McDonald's will finally shut up shop on Saturday.
John Taylor, chairman of Tavistock EatWise campaign, said: "Because of the quality of our local food McDonald's has not been able to compete."
Missing from the alphabet soup of "leading national and local professional societies, academic institutions, and local hospitals and advocacy groups" at the end of the last cited article was one that advocates reason and individual rights -- due to the fact that it offered wholehearted opposition to the recent trans fat ban: the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI).
I quote from the October press release of the Ayn Rand Institute on the subject of the ban because it highlights something the empirical data from across the Atlantic do not show us.
New York has no right to force all restaurants in the city to severely limit the content of trans fats in their food.Government interference in our daily affairs is not only superfluous at best. It is wrong.
The government has no right to dictate to restaurants what they can or cannot serve, and it has no right to dictate to individuals what they can or cannot eat.
Individuals should be free to judge for themselves what foods to eat, including if and when to eat foods with trans fats.
Those who believe that trans fats are unhealthy are free not to eat food that contains them--and free to persuade others not to sell or consume them. They have no right, however, to dictate the recipes of restaurants. [bold added]
-- CAV
2 comments:
Damn right it's wrong. I live in New York and, although I don't smoke, I lit up a cigarette when they were banned in all restaurants and bars in New York City. I look forward to eating my Krispy Kreme donut (presumably it is made with trans-fats; why else does it taste so good??) on the day the ban goes into effect.
New York used to represent the free-spirited, secular front of the U.S. Today it represents the busy-bodies who desire to control and tax our bodies so that they can feel morally upright. New Yorkers claim they despise the "church-ladies" of the hypocritical South. Yet New Yorkers have become the laughing-stock of the country, with their politically correct do-gooder emasculation of themselves.
Where will the battle for liberty be won? Certainly not in New York, where its citizens lost their spirited independence some years ago.
I share your disappointment and I'll take your allusion to the South one step further.
I grew up in Mississippi around the time the religiously-motivated "blue laws" (e.g., you can't buy milk and other items on Sunday -- although, strangely, if you weren't in a dry county, beer was OK) were finally being repealed. This is definitely worse.
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