Hey FTC surprise, fast food restaurants try to sell food to kids. In a a move that seems completely motivated by the meddlesome, nanny-wannabe attitude of our government officials, the FTC decides that they should investigate the marketing practices of 5 restaurant company giants. The two largest restaurant companies, the number 2 and 3 hamburger chains and Chuck E. Cheese Pizza are now forced to submit ALL of the marketing plans and programs and explain how they ‘target’ kids and adolescents.
I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of the government telling me "what’s best for me" and trying to legislate my "perfect life." What in the heck are they thinking up there? We don’t know that kids love ‘Happy Meals’, mice that sing, or toys with the french fries? Come on. Can we not find better things to do with our tax dollars than fund ridiculous investigations of the fast food industry and whether or not they are trying to sell more hamburgers to kids. If it were me, as CEO of one of the big chains, I’d say "Yep you caught us, we are trying, really hard to sell more hamburgers to kids! So now what are you going to do?" Wasn’t our country built on capitalism and the free enterprise system? Last time we tried communism here, wasn’t it William Bradford who discovered that it just doesn’t work.
Come on Washington, enough already. How ’bout spending your energy on something important like figuring out how to win the war on terror.
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That’s just terrible! Those kids see those commercials, want what they see, hop in their cars, drive to Chuck E. Cheese’s, and spend all of their hard-earned money there.
Just terrible.
What’s that? The kids don’t actually spend any money? They can’t drive cars?
Hmmmm….I wonder how these kids, influenced by these terrible advertisements, manage to be hurt then?
Dan
>Can we not find better things to do with our tax
>dollars than fund ridiculous investigations of
>the fast food industry
Welcome to the war that us libertarians of all stripes (i.e., Big L, Little L, Free Marketeer, Small Government. and other flavors) have been fighting for decades. Perhaps you might now consider that the gooferment can’t do ANYTHING right. Let alone do something in an efficient or effective manner.
It was the gooferment that labeled “butter bad; margarine good” in some world war or another. Seems like we are always at “war”! It is the gooferement that now tells us that “transfats are bad”. (Isn’t that just like margarine?) And, don’t smoke, drink, or forget to wear your seat belts. (Recently they surmised a woman and her children drowned when she could NOT free the children from their gooferment mandated child seats. Some of us can remember cars without the optional seat belts.) (P.S.: New Hampshire without a seat belt law has a high rate of seat belt use than Taxachusetts where it’s mandatory!) And, you don’t need any of them there vitamins or supplements says the FDA. (Guess because they are cheap insurance and none of their buddies — I mean “regulated” drug companies — can profit from them, you can’t have them.) And since the gooferment regulate food and drug, the gooferment is allowed to tell you what you can or can’t put in your body. Like Thalidomide. But, the geese will be safe no that patty faux grasss has been added to the banned list.
Never mind that medical cost and drug costs are thru the roof due to regulation. I have to go the gooferment approved doc to get a gooferment approved Rx that I can take to the gooferment approved “drug” store built to gooferment standards and staffed with gooferment approved druggists following gooferment approved procedures who will sell me gooferment regualted drug manufactured in gooferment approved facilities built to gooferment standards. And you wonder why costs are high. time to market for new drugs are long, and mistakes are made all the time?
Taxes are theft. Regulation and Inflation are just taxes in a different guise. Wouldn’t we all be better off if they would slim back down to Constitutional size.
Just wait, you have seen anything yet. The gooferment is like the Blob and absorbs everything. Now where is my pitchfork and torch. The townsfolk are assembling to burn City Hall and I don’t want to be late. Or was it Frankenstein’s castle?
Argh! Thanks for getting me aggravated!