Should Government regulate what we eat?

Basic economics tells us that people respond to incentives. In 1965 Ralph Nader published a book called Unsafe at Any Speed, calling attention to various design elements, which caused cars to be too dangerous. The federal government soon responded with a wide range of automobile safety regulation requiring seatbelts, padded dashboards, collapsible steering columns, dual braking systems, and penetration-resistant windshields.

Even before the regulations went into effect, any economist could have predicted one of the consequences: Auto accidents would increase. The threat of being killed in an accident is a powerful incentive to drive carefully. The new safety features reduced the threat of death. Because people respond to incentives, drivers would be less careful.

Were the economists correct? It turns out that the number of accidents substantially increased, but the amount of deaths per accident decreased. In 1970, Sam Peltzman of the University of Chicago discovered that the 2 effects cancelled each other out so the amount of driver deaths didn’t change. However the there was an increase in pedestrian deaths who gained no benefit from penetration-resistant windshields.

The real solution to reckless driving is to require every car to have a knife welded on every steering wheel, pointing directly at the driver’s heart! (Armen Alchian UCLA confidently predicts that this would substantially reduce tailgating.) For a further discussion on incentives please refer to the Armchair Economist chapter 1.

Last year New York passed legislation making it illegal to sell trans-fats at public restaurants (it is a deranged society that considers unhealthy food to be a greater sin than killing babies- Please refer to New BYU Speeches Oct. 24th podcast on abortion and infanticide- How Do We Think about What Is Human?: C. S. Lewis and The Abolition of Man) I argue that government regulation on trans-fats will have the same negative effects as the previously mentioned example.

It seems to be increasingly trendy to watch what we eat, and to pay attention to modern nutritional research. Fear of obesity and being judged on appearance are the incentives that promulgate this trend (sadly these incentives seem greater than the incentive of longevity). It seems that people will gain a false sense of security in the new government regulations on food. When there is less incentive to be responsible, people will not watch what they eat and the negative effects of obesity could be worse than the effects of trans-fats.

To be continued…