I didn’t say that, but I’m sorry I wasn’t clearer. After 1960, they stopped advertising themselves as healthy because they knew everyone knew it wasn’t true by then. And in the decades to come it was so commonly known that they knew they’d be prosecuted if they did so.

Governments don’t play fair. Markets correct themselves- governments rarely admit fault and force views of a few on the populace.

We should allow consenting adults to make their own decisions. If someone gets defrauded, the judicial system should handle it.

Cigarettes have never been advertised as being healthy? Really?

That was fraud, and they should be prosecuted. Not putting calories on the board isn’t fraud. Also, those lies were abetted by government regulations (see my previous post, the one you didn’t respond to yet, above).

Also, it was common knowledge for centuries that smoking was unhealthy. King James (the one with the Bible) said in 1604 that smoking was, “a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”

Do you guys genuinely have so much religious faith in business to believe that they’ll play the game more fairly than the government?

A. Do you have “so much religious faith” in calorie numbers that you actually think that printing them in one more place will make any difference? Cause it won’t.

B. One of your examples (cars) is so vague I have no idea what you’re talking about. If you’re going to try to hold up Ralph Nader as a hero of consumer rights advocacy, I’m not impressed.

C. Your other two examples (cigarettes and pharma) involve industries that have used the government regulations to shield themselves from liability. If tobacco hadn’t had the government stamp of approval for advertisements about low tar, how many people wouldn’t have picked up smoking, thinking it was now “safer?” If big pharma couldn’t potentially hide behind FDA approval, how many fewer unsafe drugs would they produce? Thanks to over-reaching government nannies, we’ll probably never know.

Because I’d swear a simple search brings up reams of evidence proving this to be incorrect. But fine, maybe cigarettes have always come with warnings.

How about the automobile industry’s long-standing refusal to acknowledge their products dangerous designs?

Or the pharmaceutical industry’s knowledge of bad outcomes from particular medications which have been routinely covered up?

Do you guys genuinely have so much religious faith in business to believe that they’ll play the game more fairly than the government?

Sure, but that doesn’t give you an accurate calorie count. For example, a good part of the calories in the raw hamburger are drained off the grill into a grease bucket when it’s served. You could try to measure how much grease 100 hamburgers make, and roughly determine the composition of that grease, and calculate calories from that, but it’s as complex as using a calorimeter. The fries gain calories from absorbing frying oil – but that’s not the only reason oil disappears from the fryer.

If instead of highly processed foods like McDonald’s burgers and fries, you consider anything that might actually be healthy, it’s even worse. Food comes from living organisms, and living organisms are never identical. Every apple has a different ripeness and percentage of sugar, as well as weight. I can find the average calories, vitamin C content, etc., for a particular breed and grade of apple, and I could calculate these numbers for a Sara Lee apple pie made by chopping thousands of apples together, but I can’t tell you much about the particular apple you are holding in your hand. Likewise, every slice of meat will have a different fat content; a processor big enough to supply McDonald’s is big enough to mix up tons of fatty meat, tons of lean meat, measure the fat content and produce consistent burgers, but smaller, less environmentally disastrous butchers can’t do that.

Result: large chain restaurants with fixed menus and homogenized ingredients can comply, but they’ll pass the cost on to consumers, and even they will have to hold up releasing new recipes for testing, and then for printing new information cards. Non-chain restaurants, small chains, and anyplace that serves food that wasn’t processed in a huge factory cannot comply with much precision. Nor can any smaller chain or individual restaurant keep reprinting their menus for every time they vary a recipe because some ingredients are not available at a reasonable price.

So you’ll exempt small chains, non-chains, fruits, etc.? Then you wind up with thousands of pages of regulations, and a large class of bureaucrats trying to interpret them – or perhaps, looking for interpretations that are favorable or unfavorable depending on how good the restauranter is at sucking up. In many jurisdictions, that already describes the way health inspections really work, this just piles on another, far less necessary, layer of bureaucracy to harass small businesses.

So cigarette companies were forthcoming about the fact that their product was linked to cancer, voluntarily?

That’s an interesting example you bring up, since for 42 years tobacco companies used a government approved test to provide tar levels on packs of light cigarettes. Oops, that data was meaningless.

More information (especially government approved information) is not always better… it can be used as noise to distract consumers from the really important things.

I can’t wait to see the tactics that restaurants use to twist your precious calorie counts into making people buy more stuff. Wendy’s could offer an 1100 calorie double baconator, for instance, so that the people eating the 800 calorie baconator will feel more virtuous. Whatever the outcome, I’ll bet money that none of this junk makes us skinnier.

They didn’t need to be. Everybody and their doctor knew it already. They weren’t allowed to lie in their advertisements and say cigarettes were safe or healthy, and I think that’s about all the protection consumers need or deserve from their government in terms of product information.

Businesses will not ever voluntarily give out information which harms their own bottom line.

And yet they’ve been voluntarily giving out calorie information for years.

‘Businesses will not ever voluntarily give out information which harms their own bottom line.’ is a pretty broad statement. Can you back this up? Concrete examples of govts over-regulation stifling the market are easy to find.

‘President Bush symbolically closed a crucial chapter of his presidency last night by declaring “victory” in Iraq aboard an aircraft carrier returning combat forces to the United States.’

‘It’s OVER! Success! We Win!

So was the composite declaration of a recent gathering of former United States drug czars on June 17, which marked the 35th anniversary of the war’s beginning in 1971 with the appointment of Dr. Jerome H. Jaffe, a psychiatrist, as the first White House drug czar.’

‘After five long years, the United States has finally secured victory in the War on Terror, George W. Bush declared today.’

‘Nixon declared “victory with honor” for Vietnam’

Let the business owners and consumers decide the value of the product/information.

As Li points out, ‘…how long would it take the inspector to see if the calories and ingredients are displayed on the menu? Five seconds?’ Not if it’s a typical govt bureaucracy! We’ll now have caloric inspectors to go with the smoking inspectors and trans fat inspectors and health inspectors and fire inspectors and… it doesn’t stop. I’m sure most cities have several different departments to conduct these inspections and re-inspections. ‘Sir, someone marked on your caloric count information with a sharpie- you’re in violation of code 598.732. You must rectify this or we’ll have to fine you.’

It’s only a small intrusion to the people who want this. To the rest of us, it’s more nonsense. Of course, the smoking bans are beneficial to all of us. Just ask the people who hoisted them onto us. Also, the trans fat issue is a no-brainer…

If there’s real value in this service, restaurants will provide it. It shouldn’t be forced onto them. These are private businesses- you don’t have to patronize businesses that don’t fulfill your needs.

I think the problem has more to do with lazy ass suburban lifestyle than food choices.

Bingo.

I remember back in my old hometown there was a restaurant with a theme of sorts, that of the old family farm. They specialized in huge portions — giant pork chops, generous steaks, breakfasts with everything. Back when people were going out to work the fields after an early breakfast (or heading to the factory in later years), eating like that worked just fine, but nowadays virtually no one works off that kind of calorie intake. We’re not getting fatter because we’ve suddenly taken up worse eating habits, we’re getting fatter because we spend more time sitting on our butts than we used to.

In this case, the added information is beneficial to some consumers, who make decisions based upon the newly provided knowledge.

This is not “newly provided knowledge,” especially not to the consumers who find it beneficial. Calorie counts have been provided by restaurants for years, and in the cases where the restaurants didn’t provide them have frequently been available through third parties.

There’s nothing new here, except that competition created the calorie counts, and government mandate is uselessly requiring they be on the menu.

Government often stands in the way of entrepreneurship. Mandatory calorie counts is not an example of this, and claiming it to be deflects from the more serious government interference that genuinely prevents market function (drug wars, for example). In this case, the added information is beneficial to some consumers, who make decisions based upon the newly provided knowledge. Just because you don’t want or need calorie counts hardly means they’re without value.