Information is NOT free. You want to do harm to the restaurants by forcing additional costs on them. Determing that information requires collection, organization, storage, tabulation, calculation, checking, verifying, reporting and dissemation, all of which cost time and money.

Moreover, I assume you will expect this to be enforced. This means hiring more inspectors, taking food and labor from restaurants, hiring chemists, buying (or outsourcing) labs, performing tests, writing reports, holding hearings, collecting fines, listening to appeals etc., all of which costs even more time and money, causing additional harm.

Now, one could argue that the value of this information outweighs the costs. But if that were the case, consumers would be willing to pay for it in the form of increased prices to offset the harm caused by the costs of gathering the information in the first place. And when that occurs, restaurants voluntarily do so, such as with Subway and McDonalds.

But, much more importantly to this discussion, when that doesn’t happen – that is, when consumers won’t make up for the harm caused by the costs of determing the information, restaurants don’t provide it. That is the very key point here:

We know for a fact that the proposed law will cause net harm because if it wouldn’t, the actions would already be done so voluntarily.

Secondly:
“Evidence that consumers do care about calorie counts: when they’re asked, they say that they care.”

Except what they were actually asked (at the conceptual level) is “Do you want calorie counts for free?” But it’s not free, so that poll is worthless. “What are you willing to pay for calorie counts?” is a worthwhile poll, and we actually already know the answer without having to bother to ask people: “Not enough to cover the costs of providing the information.”

* The most important point you’re missing is that insofar as the restaurant owner isn’t defrauding consumers, nobody has the moral right to force him or her to provide information. It doesn’t matter if 84% or 94% or 99.9994% would prefer it.

Businesses have often refused to offer up information which was of no interest to consumers until they learned of it – you’re proposing to speak for the wants and needs of everybody else. I’d prefer we let them do that themselves.

Wait, you’d prefer who do what now? Making someone do something is not the same as letting them do it themselves.

Evidence consumers don’t care about calorie counts: Businesses that don’t offer them don’t go out of business.

Why not just let consumers vote for the info they want with they’re wallets?

Les, the information isn’t “readily available” in the same way it would be on, say, the side of a package.

But it doesn’t have to be on the side of a package to be available to those who care (calorie information isn’t even listed on some foods… produce, for instance). People that are on diets that rely on calorie counts figure this stuff out… it’s not hard. You look it up on the Internet, you deduce it from the ingredients, you check the sheet in the restaurant.

Sullum’s point is that people who care about calories find out about calories. If enough people actually cared, restaurants that didn’t list calorie info would go out of business.

Opposing the dissemination of information is a mind-boggling position for free-marketeers to take, as it undermines the very thing that you’re advocating for.

I’m on Atkins, so I want to know the number of carbs. My wife is doing South Beach, and needs to know the glycemic index. You’re doing a low fat diet, and want to know fat grams. Someone else is doing some wacky new shit and needs to know the precise amount of water, in milliliters, that went into his food. Suddenly we have a really big menu board, and it just keeps growing every time someone else wants more of this precious and evidently free information.

However, there’s another issue: Sullum clearly acknowledges that for at least some segment of the population, possessing this information is important. So those calorie counts do, in fact, inform the marketplace. If you’re arguing that they’re too small a percentage to actually matter, then I’m arguing that the percentage of people opposed to calorie counts don’t matter. Sullum acknowledges 84 plus percent of polled voters wanted this stuff listed – even if then only 1 in 8 people bother to use it. So which is it? If 16 percent (those opposed to mandatory calorie counts) is a high enough number to justify not writing a policy, shouldn’t 12 percent be a high enough number to justify having those counts in the marketplace?

Information in the marketplace hurts nobody, and a marketplace without information isn’t functioning optimally. Opposing the dissemination of information is a mind-boggling position for free-marketeers to take, as it undermines the very thing that you’re advocating for.

Stream health can be pretty much directly correlated to the watershed impervious area. It doesn’t particularly matter WHAT kind of impervious area it is, just that it exists. More impervious areas, like roads, trails, sidewalks, roofs, decks, etc, mean more quantity of runoff, which means more transport of pollutants to streams, more erosion upland of streams, and more erosion in stream channels. Additionally, the change in hydrologic conditions (how fast the rainfall runs into streams) means that with higher impervious coverage, storm runoff has a higher peak, and then a reduced baseflow, as water that would have permeated to groundwater and fed the streams over a longer period of time runs quickly off the land and into the streams.

How does this relate to bikes? Well, that’s impervious area, and for the most part it’s *severely* underused impervious area. So it’s just sitting out there, increasing heat island effects, decreasing stream health, and not really providing much benefit for the few trips per day it actually gets used for.

I’d much rather see cyclists given more respect in the roadway travel lanes, especially in developed areas. Reduce roadway paved width, don’t make it wider for things that are barely used. If people need areas to walk, there are more pervious methods for walking areas, including grass, that would work just as well for the few trips it gets, while being much better for the environment overall.

[man, there are some dumb city attorneys out there. this was a no-brainer of a case.]