Los Angeles Councilwoman proposes ban on fast food
Los Angeles Councilwoman Jan Perry has proposed a lifetime ban on new fast food restaurants opening in her district of south Los Angeles. Here is Perry’s quote about why she is proposing this ban:
“What I hope happens is we make it a permanent ordinance, so we can continue our efforts to protect people’s health in a permanent way,” Perry said. “It’s also a land-use issue. We don’t want to lose whatever available land there is to activities that are detrimental to people’s health.”
I love how her solution to the nation’s growing obesity is to just ban the restaurants from opening. How about we try to get to the root of why people eat so much fast food. Has it occurred to her that society has changed, family structure has changed and people are staying home and having a family dinner less and are just grabbing something quick or picking something up on the way home more and more.
Let’s stop trying to enact these band-aid policies and try to fix real problems with this country.
Here is more from the story:
There is precedent for cities regulating the fast-food business, at least partly based on public health concerns.
The cities of Calistoga in Northern California and Concord, Mass., for example, have banned new fast-food restaurants in parts of their cities. Health issues were cited, though both bans relied on traditional zoning issues, such as aesthetics, as a legal basis.
The fact that they need to hide behind zoning laws shows that what they are trying to do is illegal.
Attention lawmakers: Stop trying to tell us what we can and can’t do. If someone wants to eat fatty foods, it is their choice to do so. Just because you think it isn’t healthy don’t take away our right to choose. This will only lead to more government control and pretty soon if we aren’t following the government recommended diet and following the government recommended list of acceptable foods we will start getting thrown in jail.
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Tags: fast food ban, Government Control, Jan Perry, Los Angeles, obesity
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July 22nd, 2008 at 12:23 pm
That is outrageous. I am getting so tired of government meddling in every aspect of people’s lives. Smoking was just the start — approve or disapprove of cigarette smoking, banning it from private businesses opened the flood gates to government interference in how people choose to conduct their private lives and how private, non-taxpayer-funded businesses are supposed to function. It seems to me that if a bar allows people to smoke, non-smokers have the choice to go elsewhere. The same goes with food. Will government dictate to fast food restaurants how to cook their food? And maybe have weight scales at the door so only certain people are allowed to eat there?
On another note, what about the right of the fast food companies to conduct business? Surely, these politicians enjoy the sales tax and property tax revenues they receive from those businesses.
July 22nd, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Well, given that government is an institution put in place in part to protect people from themselves, I suppose this does make a fair amount of sense. If people had were rational enough not to eat something that would result in their fat asses driving up health care costs for the rest of us, this obviously wouldn’t be required. But, people being ignorant to their own needs, and duly ignorant to the effect their quick fixes have on those others inhabiting society, we must restrict the availability of bad choices.
Incidentally, to Urbain, there is no “right” to conduct business in any context. And of course anyone would appreciate sales and property tax. At the same time, it would require a fair stretch of the imagination to think that the absence of a fast food joint would exclude the presence of a some other business to fill its physical and fiscal space. Oh, and of course the government dictates how fast food restaurants cook their food and thank God for it! I’d rather not get both fat and E. Coli when I munch.
Anyway, make yourself a damn PB & J.
August 11th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
“Well, given that government is an institution put in place in part to protect people from themselves…”
Actually, when our forefathers created the Declaration of Independance, their intention was for government to protect individual rights. So, not “to protect people from themselves”, rather to protect people from other people, including the government itself. (That some signers of the Declaration still owned slaves does not negate the fact that they established the philosophy that doomed slavery.) It is not the governments job to, and although they do it, they have no right to ‘dictate’ to us where and when we can eat fast-food or any other food, and where and when I can open up a fast-food restaurant, if I so chose to.
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