Newsweek has a piece entitled “Can Laws Fix the Obesity Crisis?” It starts out by identifying a couple of places where government is imposing itself in order to force the people to eat healthy. The piece also points out that there haven’t been any good studies to determine if these laws are effective. But the key comes in near the end of the article when an associate professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell said this [emphasis mine]:

In most cases, a little experimentation in the name of public health is a good thing, says Cawley, as long as the stakes are low—building public sidewalks is a costly project that would require a lot of evidence of efficacy before it’s implemented, he argued. “As an economist, I’m much more willing to experiment with a policy when there’s no apparent downside—it may end up being ineffective, but there’s no down side to the government or doesn’t harm anyone.”

In other words, it doesn’t matter if laws fix this “crisis” as long as the people are directed to follow these dictates. The people’s freedom is immaterial. Increased costs to producers and consumers aren’t a concern. The only thing that matters is that “there’s no downside to government.”

These types have been trying to tell us what to eat for years. Yet if the numbers are true and there is a crisis, it’s the fault of supposedly “well-intentioned” liberals (the well-intentioned part is debatable), although they would never admit it.

People eating healthy has been a concern of the government for quite awhile. Back in 1990, Congress passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (the bill and amendments were passed by voice vote in both Houses and signed by President George H. W. Bush) to direct the FDA to apply new standards for labels that food producers put on their products. This was done with the usual liberal line for such things, to “give people an informed choice.” So how has it worked out? If this chart at the National Institute of Health, based on CDC data, is any indication, the NLEA is, not surprisingly, a failure:

Apparently, government educating the consumer hasn’t worked. So now liberals are content to impose their beliefs upon the rest of us, regardless of the harms to the Constitution or freedom. And it isn’t me saying it; liberals admit it openly in both words and actions. Even Newsweek doesn’t bother to discuss either the Constitution or freedom. Now with Obamacare being the law of the land (for now), it isn’t a stretch to say that the federal government will issue more unconstitutional dictates upon the people, for “their own good.”

Newsweek repeats the question:

These policies—and others like them throughout the country—are imposed with the best of intentions: designed to improve wellness, reduce health-care premiums, and help citizens lose weight and eat healthfully. But do they work? The answer, for now at least, is “who knows?”

Wrong answer. The right answer is a resounding “no”. But liberals don’t care. All that matters is that they control the people.