100 South Mill Avenue

They love to regulate and tax my industry…well any industry. And they are eager to take over the Nation’s entire health care system and “fix” it, but they can’t make a buck in the food and beverage industry, so they are going to privatize it (at the Senate):

Money-losing Senate restaurants to go private (AP)
 [T]he Senate, following the lead taken by the House more than 20 years ago, moves to privatize the restaurants, coffee shops and cafeterias located in the Capitol and Senate office buildings. [...] By comparison, wrote Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who as chairman of the Senate Rules Committee has spearheaded the privatization drive, the Senate restaurants last year cost taxpayers $1.3 million with food quality and service that is “noticeably sub par.”.

You MUST read the whole article…it’s almost unbearably ironic.

This column over at the Chicago Tribune brings to mind the many efforts across the country and from time to time in Arizona to require nutritional labelling on restaurant menus. I have much to say about the many problematic consequences of this well-intentioned but erroneous concept; it is actually tough to decide where to begin. I strongly recommend that you read the column, and in addition, ponder these thoughts:

1. People dine out for a pleasurable experience and entertainment, not just for convenience and caloric maintenance. They want to sin when they eat at a nice restaurant, and having a hair-shirt wearing vicar from the nanny state whisper the evils of their menu choices into their ears as they ponder the menu ruins the experience. This is still a society in which we are free to choose acts that may have negative consequences. The State does not own your body (and if you are tempted to flirt with that concept, don’t forget that it came to a very bad end in the eugenics programs of Germany’s National Socialists).

2. These laws are often enacted by dividing chain restaurants from independents, as it is politically risky to impose a new cost on local businesses. It is in fact true that the expense of a nutritional analysis is a disproportionate burden on a single-location independent versus a chain. Let’s suppose a steakhouse chain has 1000 locations with the same menu, and that the nutritional analysis of their menu costs $1000 dollars. That analysis really only costs  each unit of the chain $1 dollar to implement, spread over all of the locations with the identical menu. But the local independent operator will have to make back all $1000 before he can make $1 of profit. (And if his cost structure is like many locals, 10 to 20 percent profit margin, that might require tens of thousands of dollars in sales. Do you really believe that the exemption of local restaurants would last very long once chains are conquered? Arizona’s smoking law certainly doesn’t exempt small operators, nor should it. So, don’t be fooled by the political trick of divide and conquer.

3. And if you like paying $5.00 per gallon for gas and the spiralling cost of groceries, then you will really enjoy the additional cost of this legislation. Of course, you won’t see it directly–but it will cause an unnecessesary increase in cost at a time when most consumers can least afford it. Reprinting all of those menus gets really expensive–and wastes paper.

4. Finally, this type of law limits your choices. Once a restaurateur, or chain, has paid for all of that nutritional analysis, how often will they wish to introduce new items? If they have to reprint menus with new information every time they change an ingredient, how frequently will they do it. Again, this type of legislation favors chains, because they can spread the cost of changes over more business units. So if you wish to walmart-ize the dining business, go right ahead.

So slap that government hand out of your pocket, and resist the collectivist, fascist impulse to control your life with leviathan-state legislation that improves nobody’s health while adding expense to your budget.