But, of course, if one person benefits from the information being posted, your argument collapses, because you keep claiming that everybody knows that Baconators are dangerous food. So will you acknowledge that printing the calorie count might be a good idea if you’re wrong about EVERYBODY knowing?

For the record, there’s nothing wrong with believing in commerce as controlled by businesses that offer little information to consumers – just don’t call yourself supportive of markets, because you clearly only support the producer end of them.

;)

Second, the point was not that everyone should know or care what King James said. It was that nearly everyone realized that smoking was unhealthy — without labelling requirements and pronouncements from doctors in silly military uniforms — almost back to the day smoking was invented.

Just like they know that a baconator has a lot of calories.

Don’t get it yet? Explain to me again how markets thrive on information, so we have to tell everyone stuff they already know.

Grizzly, I think there was plenty of doubt and ignorance regarding the health affects of tobacco in the 50’s, the Surgeon General report wasn’t issued until 1964.

King James said in 1604 that smoking is “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.”

I don’t think that anyone (who wasn’t deluding themselves) needed the Surgeon General to tell them that smoking wasn’t healthy.

Not that I endorse a lunch counter owner acting like a jackass towards people who differ in appearance from him – folks like that don’t get my money, and his customers tend to get an earful from me.

the fifties was when everyone was clean-shaven and wore a shirt and tie, and adolf mccarthy tried to send the hollywood scriptwriters into the death camps.