Almost every week I write something that is included in the update of the Minnesota Free Market Institute. Here’s my contribution for this week’s newsletter. (The formatting in the original is lost here.)
In response to my last Weekly Update commentary, someone sent along a note, which said in part, that my “ignorance about American obesity is amazing. It has become a forgone conclusion that the problem is in the over use of corn based products in our food. It has replaced sugar in everything from soda pop to almost every food product made in this country…Come on you guys don’t make misleading statements it just furthers your lack of credibility.”
Since I’m always on the prowl for writing fodder, I’ll thank the correspondent for the excuse to write about something else. I mentioned obesity not to talk about obesity per se, but about poverty and wealth.
If we turn to obesity, however, high-fructose corn syrup (HCFS) is everywhere in food these days, and some people think that it’s part of our national obesity problem. Daniel Engber, an editor at Slate, recently reviewed the literature on the subject. Public policy does work in favor of HCFS in at least two ways. The first is federal farm spending, which offers subsidies that make corn (and one of its derivatives, HCFS) cheaper than it would otherwise be. The second policy is a tariff on imported cane sugar.
So it’s pretty clear to me that government does in fact affect the foods we eat, making it more economical for companies to use one form of raw ingredient (HCFS) rather than another (cane sugar). But does that mean that this politically driven alteration of business choices make us fat? Maybe. But maybe not. Engber points out that Australia has a similar obesity problem, but relies instead on cane sugar.
Another obesity-related argument you’ll run into is that the “food pyramid” propagated by the federal government for years also makes us fat, by encouraging people to eat the wrong kinds of food. (See this article for a presentation of the argument.)
I’ve got no brief for or against HCFS and you certainly shouldn’t listen to me for diet advice. But the record is clear in policy area after policy area that government policies in general have unintended and unforeseen consequences.
Governments have constitutionally prescribed roles. Unfortunately, national, state, and local governments have repeatedly reached beyond those roles, inevitably injecting questions of political payoffs into questions that would otherwise be answered through the voluntary interaction of free individuals.