Freedom, Choices Don’t Cause Obesity, Unhappiness

He cites various studies that found you people at the Cheesecake Factory who think there are too many options, may just throw your hands up and not buy anything. If that’s the case, why do we have all this obesity – and how do you ‘treat’ it anyway? Do we listen to the nerds from the Center for Science in the Public Interest who put a new food on their banned list every week? Schwartz writes, ‘If you believe that individuals are the best judges of their own welfare…’

Well who doesn’t believe that? Liberals don’t! They think you’re too stupid to make a single correct decision, and that only they have the smarts to lead you to your destiny. Oh, it won’t be anywhere near your full potential, but if only you weren’t too stupid to turn over all your decisions to them, you’d eek out an existence. I would counter this guy’s book, ‘The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less,’ with Gregg Easterbrook’s book: ‘The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse.’

If Gov’t Picks Our Food, Should It Pick Our Spouses?
Schwartz writes, “For starters, increased choice creates an enormous burden on people to seek the information needed to make a good decision. Who has the time to find the best digital camera, the best cell phone, the best 401(k), the best health insurance, or the best school for his children?” Uh, people who care? This misses the point. If you’re disappointed in the things you choose, it’s because you’re worried more about what other people think of your choices than you are about your own happiness. You fear, “People will laugh at me if I say I picked my car because I liked the way it looked.”
The UN’s World Health Organization “globesity” plan seeks to tell people what to eat because they’re too stupid to make the right choices. Its provisions include “pushing industry to make deeper cuts in sugar and fat in food and changes to advertising and tax policy to promote healthier diets.” I thought the Constitution empowered our government alone with the power to tax us? (I guess that was just another one of James Madison’s crazy ideas.) I thought most of the world was near total starvation, and now obesity is killing us? What happened to the population bomb? If there are people starving around the world, we need to teach them how we farm and produce food.
We need more capitalism, not more centralized global authority to tell them what to do and what to eat. (See: <a target=new href=”/home/folder/may_2_worlds_hell_holes.member.html”>Capitalism Will Save World’s Hellholes</a>) Do you remember the millions who staved in the USSR and Red China? Subsidies and handouts from various agencies like the United Nations do nothing but ruin the incentive of people to farm, and lead to more starvation. Those people have no choices, do they? These are the same people who Democrats want to turn Iraq over to, and who say that Muslims are genetically incapable of enjoying freedom and making the choices democracy requires.
Second-guessing comes from the fact that you don’t have confidence in yourself. You’re insecure or afraid that somebody will mock the choice you’ve made. But if you have the ability to be happy with who you are and the choices you make, then the more choices the better! They key is you must never transfer power to all these external people and forces, to determine whether or not you made the right choice. If you do that, you’re always going to be unhappy and second-guessing – whether your choice is for people, food or objects.