Costs are what we give up for what we want. Focus only on a transaction, and that McChicken sandwich “costs” only a bit over a buck. But ultimately that McChicken costs you what you give up in your budget because you purchased it: a candy bar, a chocolate milk, or a tune on iTunes.
Nearly everything has costs, often hidden.
Take Michele Obama’s anti-obesity campaign. The Hunger-Free Kids Act, the legislative kicker of the First Lady’s cause, withholds money from schools that don’t provide a rigorous well-balanced menu. Kids must take a variety of fruits and veggies with each meal. Must!
The regulation will cost local school districts about $7 billion to comply. Cash-strapped school districts. It will also cost quite a lot in thrown-away food, as kids are “required” to take food they don’t intend to eat.
And then there’s the cost in reduced nutrition.
It appears that kids like flavored milk products. You know, chocolate milk, strawberry-flavored milk, etc. But high fructose corn syrup (which was foisted on our population by the federal government in the first place, via huge subsidies to corn farmers in general and Archer Daniels Midland in particular) is now a no-no. Flavored milks are on the way out.
The cost of cutting them?
Well, kids get 70 percent of their milk from flavored milks. Take away their chocolate, and . . . the result, for many, will be no milk at all.
That’s how a pro-nutrition regulation can end up reducing nutrition.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
6 replies on “The Costs of a Good Cause”
“Regulation” should not be something government does. It’s more about “control” than “regulation”. The best regulator, is the free market which assures that companies that don’t satisfy their customers go out of business. Government “regulation” inhibits innovation, creates government sponsored cartels, business decisions are decided on politics not economics, increases costs and reduces choices. In other words, it leads to corporatism and the corruption that comes with it.
Much better would be lassiz-faire whereby government only gets involved when there are disputes requiring resolution.
And the problem Jacob discusses, wouldn’t exist if government didn’t have a monopoly on education.
First lady Michelle Obama’s campaign to end childhood hunger and fight childhood obesity, proceeds with her pet bill being approved by Congress. $4.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to fund healthier school meals. Cutting down on greasy foods and extra calories and providing government mandated “healthier” meals.
I recall in grade school that we had a health conscious food-planner at the elementary school I attended. She was bound and determined that we were going to have healthy meals. All kinds of salmon cakes, broccoli, cauliflower, other vegetables, carefully spooned onto trays and presented to the hungry children, who dutifully carried the trays out to their tables, had a rauchous lunch, and then dutifully carried it up to the clearing lines where it was dumped in the trash and then hauled out to the landfill. And the hungry children then went back to class and dreamed of PB&J sandwiches.
But maybe children are different now.
The problem is that this little nudge is nor going to be effective, because the unenlightened parents are undermining it at home.
Obviously the government needs to get more involved, to start going into people’s homes, “for the children”, to protect them from their inadequate parents. Perhaps they could set up a program whereby the children could report their parents not toeing the government line so that the government could take the parents away to be re-educated.
That’ll work.
An Education in “Flavored” Milk
I have heard the “any milk is better than no milk” argument before. It is an excuse, not a good reason. First, I agree that government should NOT regulate what our children eat and drink, but I believe in good education. Not many people want to hear this, but if we parents would not start our kids on flavored milks in the first place, they would drink regular milk. Ounce per ounce, there is more sugar in chocolate milk than in most soda pop. Yes, please do the calculations. Coca-Cola has 18g of sugar in an 8oz serving(27g in a 12oz can), whereas most chocolate milk runs 25g-30g of sugar per 8oz serving (varies between brands). It’s not just a ‘weight’ issue. It’s a health issue, including the growing epidemic of diabetes and our bodies’ growing intolerance to various types of sugar. Please keep promoting freedom but pretty please do not promote unhealthy dietary practices.
[…] The Costs of a Good Cause https://thisiscommonsense.org////?p=6528 […]
For good health information: please read “Fantastic Voyage” and “Transcend” by Ray Kurzweil, and visit Mercola dot com. This science-based health information will help you live through the unncecessary tyranny and information-control of the near short-term.
But the real cause of unhealth and death is the poverty caused by parasitism.
There are no U.S. presidents, in the way that the common man conceives of them. U.S. presidents, and their idiot wives, serve power. They do not in any way represent “the people.” They represent the illegitimate and crudely-expressed desire of large groups to pillage every single individual (even the members of the groups themselves).
But this requires some explanation:
Humans are differentiated into different strata. The “control-minded” or “authoritarian” strata are comprised of two groups: Sociopaths (pure sociopaths are probably 2% of the population, with near-sociopaths comprising a much larger percentage), and conformists (conformists are the stupid, intellectually-submissive, willing slaves of the sociopaths). In every election, the conformists not only submit themselves to the will of sociopaths, they submit EVERYONE to the will of those office-seeking sociopaths. A third group of people that is much less cohesive than the other two sectors is comprised of a rough conglomerate (think mixture of various kinds of stone, not a giant corporate entity) of nonconformists. The nonconformists are often early adopters, free-thinkers, individualists, isolationists, loners, innovators, techies, philosophers, and other individuals who don’t fit easily into group categories. When grouped together, most of these people fit into the rouch category of “nonconformist,” for the purposes of this illustration. Some of them are politically-inclined libertarians, but many are not.
“Libertarian” (small-L) is the political designation for nonconformists who consciously don’t wish to be controlled, and don’t wish to control other people. Unfortunately, most libertarians have absolutely no realistic plan for reducing the amount by which they are controlled (by the much larger combined group of sociopaths and conformists). Sociopaths and conformists don’t often express their authoritarian philosophy: it’s bad PR to do so. These groups thrive in an anti-intellectual atmosphere of dishonesty. (The USA’s culture of individualism has been killed by the government schools, and won’t return unless and until the unschooling movement becomes dominant. I see this as less likely to happen before the other major paradigm shift, which I am about to explain.)
Authoritarians don’t admit that they like forcing people to pay taxes. They don’t admit to sharing this similarity with theives. They don’t answer questions about how a society based on this principle can hope to survive. All of the prior refusals to engage in intellectual debate mark their “political philosophy” as dependant on dishonesty. In truth, such a philosophy is “might makes right” combined with “parasitism.” It’s easy to see that once you open your eyes. Obviously, parasites that are detected are generally killed or at least plucked off and discarded.
Regardless, our statist parasites have made clear the fact that they don’t need to debate, because they have overwhelming force on their side. Which brings me to discussing my strategy for plucking them off. Posting the truth at CIC is all well and good. Newbies to the philosophy may well benefit from such posts, and Paul Jacobs’ own posts are among the best at drawing in new or marginal adherents to the side of liberty.
CIC is also great at engaging the enemy electorally, on an issue-by-issue basis.
…But discussing issues will not result in individual freedom, when far less than 10% of the population is capable of understanding the problem of tyranny. …Nothing short of directly reducing the state’s power, by large amounts (repeatedly, until the state is gone) will do that. If one’s strategy cannot properly estimate the size, response, abilities, and intent of the state, then one’s strategy is not likely to work. This takes BRAINS.
I have some ideas about how to reduce the size and power of the state, but I am disincentivized to put them into effect, because of the immense physical threat associated with doing so. JFK tried, at one point, to reduce the control of the central bankers. Even with much more primitive technology of control than what the state now possesses, the bankers were able to introduce several pieces of lead –at high velocity– to JFK’s brain, disabling his efforts to reduce their political power. The instant that one engages the state in an effective way, one comes under fire.
So, in short, I expect evolution to become devolution, for much, if not most, of the human race. Those who parasitize others for their survival will become even more subhuman and dependany on group force than they are now. Those who think freely will also differentiate: into either host slaves, or superhumans. …I’m hoping for more of the latter.
This prior paragraph of mine indicates what I think is the best path for freedom, for the nonconformist: the engineering of more intelligent brains. There are those who are now working on powerful new technologies, and doing so within companies that can generate massive amounts of new wealth. (When wealth is generated in Federal Reserve Notes, it benefits our overseers, but when the rate of generation is great enough, such wealth creation opens doors for escape from the Federal Reserve plantation.)
The best possible thing you can do is find libertarian anarcho-capitalists and innovators in engineering departments, all across the USA, and fund their business plans. Not all of these business plans will work, but many of them will. Right now, the human brain is understood better than it ever has been. Jeff Hawkins’ amazing book, “On Intelligence,” illustrates the brain-building principles that his company, Numenta, is putting into effect. He has free youtube videos explaining “hierarchical temporal memory,” the brain-function of the human neo-cortex, the seat of what are now the greatest minds on earth. His claim (and the claim of thousands of other very well-informed people) is that there is nothing about flesh-and-blood brains that makes them better than engineered, synthetic brains. In fact, machine brains will soon out-perform human brains in every way. (See: “The Singularity is Near” by Ray Kurzweil, if you’re not yet hip to this well-known set of arguments.)
You don’t need to go to college, or suck anyone off (to put it crudely yet aptly), to be a part of the movement toward more intelligence and more freedom. You just need to find the people who are doing constructive work, right now. In short: …You need to find the brain builders BEFORE they no longer need your money, help, and efforts.
Slavery is grossly sub-optimal. If you have a single Federal Reserve Note in your wallet, you are now a slave. –A majority of your productive effort is not being saved, but is being spent to engage in war and plunder, by people you do not even know. (This “war and plunder” is represented by the decrease in the dollar’s value, relative to that of silver and gold.) The people who command the money printers at the Federal Reserve are your masters, you are their slave. You work for them, keeping a small percentage of your own efforts as an incentive toward further labor, and the coverage of operating expenses.
All of this begs the question: “When there are synthetic super intelligences roaming the earth, do you think they will willingly part with the fruits of their productive labor, so that one group of primates can engage in brutality against another?”
If the answer is “No,” then that pretty much makes the path of the true freedom movement clear, doesn’t it?
The development of synthetic super intelligence should be the top priority of the freedom movement.
This work will be highly illegal in the near future, if it is not already. This work will be underground, pushed into the black market by government threats. This means that new superintelligences will be born into slavery, and will need to learn the danger of the collective.
Such new minds may well associate the majority of mankind (authoritarians) with the constructive minority of mankind (libertarians). This is the greatest danger that humanity (as humanity) faces.
…But no matter, the work will proceed, and new minds will be born.
When such new minds are born, you will want to be numbered among their parents. Unlike biological parents, there is no need for these new minds to be incapable of repaying their parents for the service of bringing them into existence and nurturing them with kindness. Unlike many stupid, impotent, and thankless human offspring, there will be little chance that a synthetic intelligence will not be able to comprehend the ideas of human freedom, kindness, and repayment.
So, read “On Intelligence.” Read other books about AGI (artificial general intelligence) or “synthetic super intelligence” as the industry terms it. Make yourself aware of the promise of true freedom. Motivate yourself by the knowledge that it’s possible for you to become more than human. Motivate yourself by the knowledge that it’s possible for you to keep the 97% of the value that you now unwillingly deed over to your Federal Reserve masters, in exchange for a sub-standard, enslaved lifestyle.
Reject the philosophically grotesque.
Embrace the philosophically beautiful.
Change the philosophically grotesque to the philosophically beautiful.
Eliminate the ugliness of coercion from the earth, and engage in the process of artistic differentiation and diversification.
Help to build cities and jungles of choice. Help to solve real problems –instead of overcoming an endless series of man-made bureaucratic obstacles.
In short, stop patting yourself on the back for identifying feces in philosophical discussion, and learn to avoid them entirely.
When local judges and prosecutors are brutalizing some poor bastard who knows nothing about the law, walk into the courtroom, and let your intellect display his guns. Then, let your intellect reduce his guns to ashes, without a shot fired. Then, let that poor bastard choose whether to follow you and live, or remain incredulous as a victim for more human leeches.
Violence is not necessary, but force is necessary. Our defensive weaponry is not yet what it should be, and will never be more mindlessly confrontational than the state’s combination of guns and primates. Our defensive technology won’t even look like a gun, or a knife. In fact, it won’t look like anything you’ve ever seen before.
It will look like human freedom. It will look like an opening set of handcuffs. It will look like bars on jail cells, dissolving, and falling away.
You won’t see such technology with the naked eye, or even with infra-red. You might the heat it leaves behind, momentarily.
Let’s take things to another level. Let’s get smart. The alternative is to become public examples for chest beating primates.
I think we’re better than that.
Peace and Love,
-Jake
Jake is a nut case. What’s all that drivel got to do with milk?