Professor Dark Heart asks, "why can't the government just reduce obesity by fiat? OK, that was the provocative way to put it. But the infants and young children who are eligible for WIC are in large part also the ones who are going to go on and get free breakfast and free and reduced-cost lunches at school. The government has a lot to say about what they eat for a pretty significant portion of their childhoods (and these are the kids at highest risk for obesity). Right now, most school lunch is a giant calorie-dump to get rid of surpluses produced by subsidies for Big Agriculture." In fact, he's right: Contrary to my statement yesterday, the government could certainly reduce obesity by fiat. They could ban vending machines and junk food from schools. They could force all restaurants with more than five locations to post caloric information on the menu. They could subsidize fruits and vegetables rather than grains, corn, and meats. They could orient food stamps and the Women's, Infant, and Children nutritional program towards healthier foods. All these moves would reduce obesity, though it's arguable by how much. If you wanted my pick among them, it would be posting caloric content in restaurants. It's a bit rich to watch libertarians and associated anti-government types oppose a regulation that gives consumers more useful information. This, after all, is how markets are supposed to work best. Consumers have better information, can pursue their preferences in a more coherent manner, and the market can provide, adapt, and innovate in response. Take trans fats, which have disappeared from just about every food save margarine now that they need to be listed on the package. If caloric information was posted, a lot of currently popular items would become unpopular (the awesome blossom, say), and restaurants would innovate towards lower calorie, but still filling, foods. In the absence of that information, the incentives to do so are weak. It's one of those soft ways of making the market work better towards a social end: We agree that people should be healthier, people agree that they want to be healthier, and all this would do is give them the information to make healthy decisions. It would not actually bar any foods from production or sale. But because there's some odd desire among some on the right to lionize unhealthy decisions (smoking!) and defend existing business models, whatever they may be, to the death, this regulation faces a steep uphill climb.
