The overweight debate is strikingly devoid of a dominant factor – - relative inactivity. Today’s caloric intake would cause much less obesity and diabetes if we had to walk and engage in the laborious activities of a century ago. Today we are blessed with much less premature death due to infection and accidents; there is also a CORRESPONDING reduced exposure to lower-grade illnesses – - illnesses that reduced the population’s body stores of fat.

Absent such a limit, you have the situation where Joe Plaintiff faces the prospect of financial ruin from paying the $10,000/hour “legal expenses” of MegaCorp’s “defense team” should he sue and lose. This way, Joe always knows his exposure: Court costs + double Trial Lawyer Shark’s bill.

There’s nothing “wrong” with people who eat and lounge their way to obesity. Eating is immediate gratification, physical labor is delayed gratification.

So when we point fingers at anyone other than the responsible individual, we enable the very behaivior we’re supposedly trying to eradicate/minimize. It’s the same mentality as the Drug War.

Clearly to be fat and merry is better than emaciated and dying. But the fact that we’re so complacent that we can just eat and eat is surely a sign of something larger being wrong with us.

If you look at the diabetes in this country, especially juvenile diabetes, you’d be hard-pressed not to find a problem that is getting worse.

Once you get past basic subsistence problems in a society, is when things get more challenging. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to huff and puff our way to the finish line.

Obesity isn’t that bad when compared to starvation. And not eating food that’s available is leaps and bounds easier than trying to get a meal where there is none. I’m not arguing, just providing my interpretation of techcentral’s sentiments.

It’s like we’re moaning,”oh, we’re so fat. We have so much food. Poor us. Our life is so hard.” It’s gross.

People should have the right to see civil sanction against those who wrong and harm them. Free market fraud fighting would depend on this counterbalancing backlash against contract violators and those who operate on bad faith. Given enough time, the reputation of the company/doctor/etc. would plummet and so would it’s fortunes.

The problem seems to be based in the entitlement mentality a large number of people in this nation apparently hold and a serious lack of principled and just jurors and judges. Frivolity in the courts is nothing new, but too much of it is getting past the first lines of defense, and even worse, some of it is getting to the higher reaches and becoming legal precedent. It takes years to undo the damage caused by this.

The legal system isn’t a truely free market so it wouldn’t be right to call this a “market failure” but it seems to be described as such implicitly. Often when confronted by an anti-capitalist with situations like this where free people can’t seem to fix a problem on their own, I say things take time to sort themselves out. But the problem gets greater and greater with time. The arguement could be made that more and more people are deserving of these lawsuits and more and more people are standing up for themselves in the face of fraudulent businesses and malpractice, but the problem isn’t really that but irrational fines.

Of course, the interesting thing is the left wants THIS market to remain free-er while the right generally wants THIS market to be regulated greater. Something is philosophically amiss…

But would it be right to restrict both our ability to bring these suits and to levy fines against others? It certainly would count as market intrusion and intervention, which I almost unanimously disapprove of. How would we go about fixing the problem of outrageous financial penalties and still preserve our right to sue? Has anyone run across some good or interesting articles worth reading on this?