I’m not afraid of fear itself, nor am I particularly fearful of the latest market upheaval. What I am fearful of is the government reaction to all this. My greatest fear is that the government will double down on its out of control spending and economic monkey business in reaction to the “crisis.”
It’s about time government let the market do its thing and leave us alone. Every time government gets involved it succeeds only in saving powerful cronies from having to sell their second home in Aspen. What do we, the average America citizen who gets dinged for all this crap, get in return? Nada. Zilch. Nothing.
Oh, but we do get something. We get to pay more taxes and deal with more regulation! Then, we get all the wonderful unintended consequences that go along with it. Those consequences then create another “crisis” that must be once again fixed by government. And so it goes.
Perhaps our beloved representatives will finally learn that they can only take so much from the productive and pile up only so much debt, but I doubt it. As Mark Steyn puts it in the subtitle to his latest tome, After America: Get ready for Armageddon.
Going forward, the list of unintended consequences of ObamaCare will be endless. One part of the bill includes a federal requirement for restaurants to publish calorie counts for each menu items. For smaller restaurant chains with large menus this is going to be a very detrimental law and will discourage expansion. For consumers it’s going to mean less choice because restaurants will be forced to reduce the size of their menus.
The pressure of this law will eventually force restaurants like Davanni’s to reduce consumer choice as a way of managing the overwhelming burden of maintaining their disclosures. Smaller chains that succeed in satisfying their customers and managing their business used to be rewarded with growth, but this law will put an artificial cap on expansion at 19 locations. That means that fewer people will find jobs, and even in existing stores, money that may have funded more jobs will instead go to reprinting the same menu boards over and over again. And all of this comes because political elites think that people are too stupid to know that a pizza is fattening or how to access information that already exists in much more efficient formats than menu boards.
Is this law really worth the cost? Are Americans really going to benefit from having calorie counts on their menu at Chili’s? As what point does the nanny state end? Have calorie counts discouraged people from buying unhealthy food at grocery stores? If people want healthier choices at restaurants the market will take care of it. However, progressives do not believe Americans can think for themselves. Daddy Federal Government has to take care of us, or we’ll hurt ourselves.
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