The Sad Case of Happy Meals

The ordinance San Francisco passed last year that prohibits restaurants from offering children's toys with high-calorie, high-fat foods — the so-called Happy Meal ban — finally went into effect late last week.

However, it was served with a heaping side of unintended consequences.

Shockingly, McDonald's (the clear target of the ordinance) altered its policies to get around the ban. Instead of giving away a toy with a Happy Meal, San Francisco McDonald's restaurants will now require customers to make a 10-cent charitable donation to Ronald McDonald House in order to receive the gewgaw. They can buy a Happy Meal without the toy, but they can't buy the toy without the Happy Meal.

According to SF Weekly, city officials and health activists were "blindsided" by the move. Of course they were.

Nanny-staters seemingly never consider the consequences of their heavy-handed actions. Perhaps they are too consumed by their self-righteousness and dictatorial desires to appreciate human nature. They believe people will just passively accept more and more facets of their everyday lives being micromanaged by busybodies.

As the history of central planning and statism shows, eventually a large number of citizens will chafe at such control. They will find ways to circumvent regulations, either legally (as San Francisco McDonald's have) or illegally (via graft or a black market).

Government's response often is to pass even more regulation in desperate, reactive attempts to tamp down on every recalcitrant actor. The size and power of the state grow as the ends justify the means.

What might have started as a modest (if annoying) "for your own good" rule can multiply like kudzu into a myriad number of complex laws, with an accompanying expansion in bureaucratic administration. The costs of compliance and enforcement create a drag on the economy. Individual freedom shrinks.

Look at the immediate consequences of the Happy Meal ordinance. San Francisco has made McDonald's kids meals a tad more expensive and a little more cumbersome to order. And to what end? City officials and their "food activist" allies said they wanted to combat the "crisis" of childhood obesity, which they blame on fast-food restaurants marketing their fattening wares to moppets.

Even if you accept the premise that McDonald's plays a significant role in children's weight, and that Happy Meal toys in particular are the gateway to a life of burgers and fries, that still overlooks the fact that it is the responsibility of parents to monitor what their kids eat, and to say no when the young'uns plead for the Happy Meal with the Hello Kitty figurine. It is not government's role to step in between Mom and the front counter and dictate to businesses what they should offer their customers.

San Francisco not only infringes on McDonald's freedom to market and sell. It also absolves parents of their responsibility to teach their children about choices, trade-offs, consequences, delayed gratification and disappointment.

The Happy Meal law by itself hardly is the critical piece to keeping the Jenga tower erect. But it is symptomatic of government's (both local and national) creeping reach into the private sphere. If parents should do a better job of watching their children's waistlines, then all citizens similarly should be vigilant in restricting government's intake of our personal freedoms.

REPRINTED FROM THE PANAMA CITY (FL) NEWS HERALD

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