This is a response to Max and Cathy, which got a little long for the comments section in the original post.
Max, I agree with you that government subsidies for corn and sugar are bad. However, whereas you say that “the food industry” is “majorly dysfunctional,” I would argue that federal food policy is majorly dysfunctional.
Moreover, I can agree with you about the benefits of eliminating subsidies for corn and sugar and disagree with you about the value of having Calorie Cop regulations. Both are instances of government intervention in the food industry, and in both cases I think that the intervention itself is rather dysfunctional.
Now, to the extent that Calorie Cop may hurt small businesses, Cathy raises a good point about evidence; it’s hard to find good info about the cost of calorie testing and menu changes. My impression from the NBC report that I cite in the post is that it is expensive enough to be a significant concern for small businesses.
Cathy also suggests, plausibly, that federalizing the restriction might actually reduce costs thanks to uniform requirements and greater demand for calorie testing, etc. But this is another difficult empirical issue to resolve.
And while this last point might soften my cost-based objection to the provision in the health care bill, it doesnt address the question of whether Calorie Cop regulations are fundamentally a good idea — at any level of government. To me, this is a case of cities and states adopting bad policies and making things difficult enough for businesses that they prefer the lesser evil of one uniform, national (but still bad) policy to a confusing patchwork of local and state regulations.
A second objection to Calorie Cop, aside from the claim that it will hurt small businesses, is that it is simply not effective. This, too, is relatively dependent on empirical evidence, and in my post I pointed to economic studies (cited in the Freakonomics post) which at least seem to cast significant doubt on effectiveness.
A third objection is that Calorie Cop undermines individual responsibility for making choices and dealing with the consequences.
I think that Calorie Cop, like a lot of paternalistic regulation, assumes that people are stupid or naive and panders to the lowest common denominator in a way that lowers the bar for personal responsibility. As a small business owner, you are now much more vulnerable to being sued by someone who, let’s say, gets heart disease and claims that he could not have known that the fried fish taco had so many calories because the exact number wasn’t printed on the menu.
Although Calorie Cop itself may not have a huge impact on society, I think it is part of a disturbing trend toward greater government paternalism that panders to unsavory behavior and exacerbates the cycle of irresponsibility and dependency.