HH: You know, Mark Steyn, yesterday I had on the senior vice president for communications of the National Restaurant Association, having her explain to me why the NRA threw in with the Democrats in pushing through the calorie counting mandate.
And in the course of it, she said and we are all going to wait for the FDA to tell us what font size the menus have to be on the drive thru windows.
MS: Right.
HH: And I spent the rest of the show thinking to myself, were they out of their mind pushing for the FDA to regulate them?
MS: Yes, this is insanity. I mean, this used to be the difference between the Province of Quebec and the United States of America.
In the Province of Quebec, the government regulates the language you can put the signs in on your menus, and the size of the language, the size of the language in French versus the size of the language in English. They have inspectors who come around and measure the font size to make sure that you’ve got it in the correct size.
And now this woman is offering her industry’s assistance in erecting a similarly wasteful regime here. There are going to be guys from the FDA going around with tape measures, descending on the drive-thru lane at Taco Bell and Dunkin’ Donuts. A complete waste of time, does nothing to grow the economy. A reader made a very good point to me the other day when he was talking about the old command and control economies. It’s not just in the Soviet Union, but in India before economic liberalization. And he said at least in those economies, the state actually made stuff. If you look at…
HH: Yes.
MS: …and here, the state just regulates. The massive state just regulates. It’s even more wasteful.
