It's dubious to blame obesity on the free market. At the end of the day eating well and staying healthy is a personal responsibility. In most cities and towns there are just as many healthy options available as there are unhealthy options, and most of the time it's no more expensive (or even cheaper) to eat well than it is to buy junk. Fact of the matter is, a lot of people choose to eat poorly.
I strongly disagree with the concept that another person knows better than I do which food I should eat or how I should otherwise live my life.
That said, there should be more education around nutrition. Even free healthy food doesn't help anything if people are too dumb to choose it over junk.
> At the end of the day eating well and staying healthy is a personal responsibility.
A significant portion of human beings are wired for addiction. It's a fiction to claim that people are all free and are responsible for every choice that they make. We for instance control market on all drugs that have any potential for addiction, food has a potential for addiction for lots of people. If people are so free to choose to stay healthy and eat well, then why are all drugs not freely available to anyone who wants them. Opiates, benzos, etc.
No one is saying that anyone else should tell you what to eat. I am simply saying that free food that is healthy should be freely available. No friction and no excuses to not eat healthy. And economically there is a huge incentive to eat that free food as it's free.
Drugs are kind of a straw man, but FWIW, I think those should be legal too. I'd rather my tax money not be spent baby sitting people.
But they are a great example of just how useless it is trying to control people. Heroin is illegal, yet overdoses are at an all time high. A lot of people only end up on heroin because it's so difficult to get less powerful opiate pain killers. Prohibition doesn't work. People are going to do what they want to do anyway.
Some portion of the population are going to make really stupid decisions no matter what. The rest of us need to get over it and stop trying to "help" them if they don't want it.
I feel like personal responsibility is one of those things that work nice on paper, but that requires forethought, correct information, good education, processing power. Then there's things like genetics, bad upbringing, peer pressure, propaganda (adverts), etc... which all subvert those. Human beings are not rational actors who can be expected to make optimal choices even most of the time. Even if we were robots in the sense of a computer program we would still have to deal with limits to complexity, information and processing time. Exerting restraint and self control is known to take time and energy, energy which is in limited supply and requires replenishing through intake of calories.
That's life, though. People have different information, different education, different intelligence, different upbringings, and they make different choices than you or me. I make the best decisions for myself given my experience and situation, and you do the same for yourself, and everybody else does the same for themselves. I'm not going to force my choices on you, and it's not your place to force decisions on me.
Nobody makes the absolute best decisions every single time, but in general they certainly make better decisions for themselves than a stranger.
I strongly disagree with the concept that another person knows better than I do which food I should eat or how I should otherwise live my life.
That said, there should be more education around nutrition. Even free healthy food doesn't help anything if people are too dumb to choose it over junk.