I don't see why this type of government intervention should worry anyone. It's about information transparency. Can anyone seriously argue that ingredient labels are anti-market? There are also shelf tags, in supermarkets, dictating price per quantity. How do any of those measures hurt the free market? If anything, it forces food vendors to better evaluate their products in contrast to their competition. And that seems to be exactly what's happening. A little bit of transparency goes a long way. Seems to me, that's a perfect role for government.

The government argument for me isn't all or none. It's: How much?

> Can anyone seriously argue that ingredient labels are anti-market?

Well, there are two factors:

1) If the government mandates that a certain value is indicated on the label, it also vouches to a certain extent that the "better" value (lower for calories) is actually "better". So calories is OK, but it's a slope. How about an Atkins-adherence(or whatever)-index? The problem is that once such a measure is implemented, it is exceedingly difficult to get rid of it, even if it turns out to be bogus or even misleading, because the politician supporting it will be accused of being anti-consumer (why would s/he be against more information?), or just in the pocket of Big Food.

2: It may not be very cost effective to calculate the appropriate value. Consider a restaurant, where the chef that goes to the farmers market every day and gets whats really fresh and in season. The chef now has to commit time, everyday, calculating the calorie-count for each dish. More bookkeeping, less cooking. It may be easy to do for calories (I'm not sure, I'm neither a chef nor a dietist), but what if it requires samples to be sent to a lab somewhere?

"I don't see why this type of government intervention should worry anyone."

Regulation disproportionately burdens small players. If other drafts of restaurant legislation don't exempt small players, my favorite restaurants (and my friends that run them) get a big headache.

Regulation seems to swell unless it is violently opposed. I've been locked out of exciting things by it personally (international trade), and seen it killing the things I love (eccentric houses, innovation, hiking trails) in my few short years of adulthood.

I like this regulation. But I'm going to holler mightily if it tries to get any bigger.

I think restaurants with 15 or more outlets stopped being the little guy a while ago. There is a lot of poorly done regulation that hinders the little guy but that's more an execution detail than a basic fault of regulation.

I feel that critiques of regulation focusing on quantity instead of quality miss the mark. Regulation to protect and empower consumers usually differs substantially from regulation designed to create barrers to entry. Regulation protecting the environment and other third parties can have barrier-type consequences, especially if its creation is influenced by corporate lobbyists, but it's certainly possible to do well.

What we need is intelligently designed regulation; more "source lines of legislation" isn't necessarily worse, if it covers edge cases well.

The real problem, of course, is the incentive structure for the people who vote on the legislation. It needs fixing, probably by some large, concerted effort of very smart people and a national referendum.

I am against mandatory calorie counts on menus for restaurants. I don't think it passes the benefits-costs test. And, it gives me the impression that I live in a society where everything I do is being watched and regulated. Sometimes I just want to buy a bowl of chow from another human being without justifying my action to some self-righteous bureaucrat.

> Can anyone seriously argue that ingredient labels are anti-market?

Well, it's fairly close to an issue which has been controversial: whether to require the labelling of GM milk.

Personally, I'm happy for there to be a goodly amount of regulation about consumables. I don't think a raw free market (if you sell food which makes people sick, your brand will suffer) provides enough protection in that case.

I was really trying to think about the benefits+costs of forcing sellers to give more information to consumers, and how that might translate to other products.

(Warning: - this program is written in C - it may suffer from buffer overruns. - this program is written in .NET/java - it may require a huge download in order to run - etc)

Slightly more seriously, how about a govt regulation which required showing typical working set size of your program in operation in Mbytes?

How about being required to notify users that your software patches system-level functionality? (no more DRM "rootkits" )?

If I could create backup copies of myself and/or run copies of myself in a VM I wouldn't really care about labels on food, medicine or even FDA approvals.

You might, if you find out too late that your liver has been compromised and rolling back to a previous snapshot means you're not married anymore.

Actually, I think that would be a killer app for many people...

Take this with a grain of salt, since I am not an economist. However, I think that Government intervention isn't evil.

For the free market economy to work, a number of assumptions are made in the model. For example, we assume that consumers are well informed, and make judgements on the product's attributes. We also assume that there are no significant externalities, and all costs are actually exposed to the companies.

Labelling the foods with their actual properties, testing them for safety, and other similar government intervention can actually bring things closer to the ideal free market economy where the consumers know what they're buying, and the costs of environmental cleanup are passed on to the companies causing the damage.

I consider myself a libertarian on most issues, but more of an agnostic on how well the free market works, and what the role of government should be there. Issues like this are really tough for me to decide.

"Are mandated calorie counts on foods, (evil) government intervention in the free market or a useful boost to creating an efficient market by trying to help create that essential prerequisite"

A good example of orientalism.

"A good example of orientalism."

Could you elaborate? Is it because I'm being dualistic in my apparent mindset? Surely that's more occidental? (Actually it was on purpose, but never mind).

I meant because you are imagining this platonic ideal of the free market and then going out and trying to compare how real world systems sync with that ideal.

In any event the justification behind the free market being the best economic system is that it is the most efficient way to allocate goods and services to the people who want them the most. So asking whether or not this reform interferes with the free market doesn't make much sense in this case.

If it is evil government intervention, what about warning labels on cigarettes?