We, as a society, have allowed our food supply to get saturated with sugar - fixing that is just as controlling of our lives as allowing it was in the first place.
We, as a society, have allowed tobacco smoking to bloom as it has - fixing it is just as controlling of our lives as allowing it was in the first place.
If your basis for banning smoking is that it harms smokers, then you have no logical reason to stop at smoking. The leading cause of death in the US is heart disease, if you ban smoking, you should also ban everything that can contribute to an unhealthy diet. The US has 12.4 traffic deaths per 100,000. Given that why would should anybody be permitted to drive for non-essential purposes? Millions of people suffer negative effects from social media and video game addiction, why should they be allowed to consume those products? Less that 5% of US adults get 30 minutes of exercise per day, so why should I be allowed to stream Netflix or YouTube for as long as I like?
If you think it’s the governments responsibility to ensure we make healthy choices, then you really can say goodbye to any sense of freedom over your life. Unless you think that should apply to smoking only, in which case you don’t have a rational argument.
How many processed foods would contain sugar if it raised the price by a few cents per unit cost?
If we're going down the market path of "letting people choose," why not let them bear the real cost of sugar proliferation?
Hey it's a libertarian site talking about sugar subsidies:
https://reason.com/2019/02/27/sugar-subsidies-are-welfare-fo...
For my part, since we're doing market-based stuff for diet, I'd rather end meat, dairy, and sugar subsidies entirely. (I'd actually rather we subsidize vegetables and so on, but I'd be okay with ending all of them.) Let people buy food as it really costs, and then let's see what the national diet looks like.