Big Government is Making You Fat

That’s good news isn’t it? We all wanted someone to blame! Well, that’s not the reason I’m posting this on by blog. I’m doing it because no one seems to understand what a free market is. There is an entire camp out there, including Nancy Pelosi, who blame the current market situation on the free market. The Speaker of the House specifically said, “It’s really an anything-goes mentality. No regulation, no supervision, no discipline.” Well, let’s talk about that "anything goes" situation a little.

Some people have found it strange how the tables have turned recently as far as wealth and nutrition are concerned. Once upon a time, it was fashionable to be very large because that meant that you were wealthy. Now, medical research has made it clear that the current profile of an obese person usually includes poverty. It has been established that foods which contain little nutritional value are the cheapest foods. If you don’t put too much thought into it, it’s easy to think that makes sense. Shouldn’t healthy foods be more expensive? But consider the processing that goes into creating junk food vs what it takes to grow an apple. Why in the world would highly processed foods be cheaper?

Government Regulation

According to Wikipedia, the U.S. Farm Bill is, “the primary agricultural and food policy tool of the Federal government of the United States. The comprehensive omnibus bill is passed every several years by the United States Congress and deals with both agriculture and all other affairs under the purview of the United States Department of Agriculture.” It includes a host of government subsidies which, in effect, make it cheaper to produce unhealthy food. The one food that the farm bill supports more than any other is corn. This makes it very cheap to produce corn syrup, even the high fructose kind we’ve all been warned against. Basically, the U.S. Government is paying farmers to produce high carbohydrate foods.

According to the New York Times, “A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent.” If you can, you should really read this entire article. You can find it here. It explains how these policies have also had a negative impact on other countries and our over-all economy.

So, what’s the good news here? It’s that the left’s constant attempts to tell us that “willy nilly free market policies” have caused the economic problems is just a scare tactic. How in the world can they argue that when we have not had any political leaders willing to stand up for freedom in years? Take a look at history. Take a look at what government intervention has done and ask yourself if laissez faire wouldn’t be better. You certainly can’t argue that it hasn't worked in the past, because it’s never been tried. Politicians have always been too tempted by the power that comes with control, even though they deny the responsibility.