A Stitch in Haste

Chicago now has some competition in the race to be the worst nanny-state city in America:

The New York City Board of Health today endorsed a proposal that would prohibit the city's 20,000 restaurants from serving food that contains trans fats, the chemically modified ingredients considered by doctors and nutritionists to increase the risk of heart disease.
...
The proposal met immediate resistance among restaurant owners, who said banning trans fats would raise their costs and change the taste of some menu items.
...
"Like lead paint, artificial trans fat in food is invisible and dangerous, and it can be replaced," [Health Commissioner Thomas R. Frieden] said. "No one will miss it when it is gone."

Of course, it's possible that restaurant owners might — just might — know a little bit more about their businesses, and their customers, than New York's central planner bureaucrats.

And the lead paint analogy is wholly inappropriate, because unlike lead paint, there are simply no externalities generated by trans-fat foods other than those artificially created by the government itself through socialized medicine.

Finally, one must ask where this greasy slope will take us. If banning trans fat transactions between competent, consenting adults is a proper function of government based solely on some vague, vacuous claims of "public health," then could the Board of Health, as a matter of law, also ban refined sugar? After all, it contributes to obesity and "can be replaced." What about whole milk? Salted peanuts? All peanuts?

Health police are merely a specialized form of central planner. And all central planners have a desperate and perpetual need to find ever more plans to centralize. Where real issues do not exist, they have to be invented. Do not expect trans-fat to be the last intrusion upon private transactions among private persons in the name of "public" health.

More thoughts from Rolling Doughnut, Push Liberty.

UPDATE: Overlawyered reminds me to point out that the claim that trans fat can be replaced with no loss of flavor or texture is simply false — an example here.