Posts Tagged ‘regulation’

We’re getting FAT, so what!

Friday, May 15th, 2009

So Massachusetts is starting to jump on the bandwagon with regulations around fast food and calorie notifications on menu items.  Here are a few of questions you should be asking yourself:

  1. Has anyone done any studies to see if this is effective?
  2. What is the cost of oversight on these programs?
  3. Why is this any of the governments business?

Ok, here are your answers:

  1. Hell no, why would they do that?
  2. Nobody knows, or cares
  3. Control

Let me go into detail on the 3rd one, that will explain the answers on the other two.  The government is trying to control what you eat for one reason, to control the cost of health care.  But why should government care about that, I hear you crying!  They care because they have taken over and now own health care in Mass.  This is the wonderful result of government ownership of anything, once they own it, they will control you with it.  Now since everyone is becoming a fat ass, that adds cost to the bottom line of the health care program.  How long until they start requiring people to weigh-in in order to get their full benefits.  Wait, that would be exclusory, and government can’t do that.  What they can do is control businesses, so it won’t be long before you start seeing proposed legislation on what restaurants can sell, so they can then limit what you can eat.  It’s all about control.  They rope you in one little bit at a time.

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Moral Busybodies

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

This kind of thinking is, I think, a large cause of the troubles in the world today. 

Although The Lancet study is proof of concept, experts still question the ethics of a pill for lifestyle issues.

Critics say the problems of high blood pressure and cholesterol should be tackled with diet and exercise rather than by popping a pill.

Why is it someone else’s business if I choose to “pop a pill” in order to address health issues instead of going the “correct” route of diet and exercise?  And who are these “experts” that make this decision that diet and exercise are the “correct” route?  Who appointed them our overseers?  It’s this kind of thing that erodes away at our freedoms a tiny piece at a time if we don’t address them.  First they criticize, then they suggest solutions, then they legislate what we can and can’t do.  Why do they think that they can run our lives better than we can?

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Watchdogs

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

Stories like this one really upset me.  Why is it that we call for the government to provide “oversight” of private companies like this?

The Federal Trade Commission is being asked to investigate Internet search giant Google for a lack of security Relevant Products/Services in its cloud-computing services, a framework of software and services in which applications and data reside on third-party servers that provide remote access through Web-based devices.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a Washington, D.C.-based public-interest group, filed the complaint and is asking for an injunction by the FTC to stop Google from offering any of its cloud services until the FTC has investigated Google’s safeguarding of consumers’ information.

Ok, great, so you’ve found issues with Google’s security.  Why isn’t just announcing this fact enough?  Why is there a government agency involved here?  The problem is that government really doesn’t have the resources (nor should they) to police private industry like this.  Just look at how well they “regulated” the banking industry, and the power industry, and monetary policy, and they’re getting into fast food.  I could go on and on.  They pass laws, people find creative ways around them.  If someone gets caught, they get fined, but what happens to the private investors in that scenario?  We get bent over the barrel.

Do you think that consumers are more careful about where they put their money in an “unregulated” (by that I mean not government regulated) system, or where where the government “regulates” things.  In systems where the government says they are “regulating” things, all they are really doing is providing a false sense of security to the private consumer, which is really worse than no sense of security at all.  The distributed knowledge of the people is far greater than any limited political body of bureaucrats can comprehend.

So if you’re interested in keeping as much of your money as government will let you, just remember, that watchdog that is looking out for you, someone else put him there, and he obeys them, not you, and he’s old, deaf, blind and can’t smell anymore.

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