"Caloric extremism"

Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, isn't happy that laws forcing restaurants to post calorie counts haven't induced the restaurateurs to cut high-calorie offerings from their menu. As Reuters reports, Jacobson complains that "[chain restaurants] practice caloric extremism, and they're helping make modern-day Americans become the most obese people ever to walk the Earth."

Mr. Jacobson: If you'd like Americans to slim down, you have every right to build a website denouncing high-calorie offerings at restaurants, or to publish pamphlets about the health risks of obesity, or to give a television interview stating your point of view. But if that doesn't work -- if Americans still make crappy food choices despite all the messages they get about how obesity is a bad thing -- you do not get to lobby the government to force restaurateurs to post calorie counts (nor, as is strongly implied, to force them to remove the offending items from the menu). Not in a proper society, anyway.

If you can't persuade people to eat right, you have no right to make them do it at the point of a gun.