I largely agree with your point, but there's still a slippery slope there. And some perverse incentives. For example, the way the feds mandated the national 55MPH speed limit and the drinking age of 21. It was through highway grants. Basically, the feds took a bunch of money from people which states could have taken, then offered it back to the states in the form of grants with all these strings attached. An end-around around the Constitution, really.Kriegsspiel wrote: ↑Sun Feb 02, 2020 11:12 amI think the argument goes like this, "I don't care what food you buy with your own money, but when you're taking my money I get a say in the matter."sophie wrote: ↑Sun Feb 02, 2020 10:42 am I've wondered that too. They could limit the cards to unprocessed foods, and ban them from being used for desserts, sodas etc. People could still buy them just with their own money.
But, MangoMan's larger point is correct: whether it's SNAP limitations or talking grocery carts, why is the government in the business of telling us what to eat anyway? For millions of years, humans got by just fine without official dietary guidelines - and that was true for most of the industrial age as well. It's only since the US government started doing that (1977) that people started getting fat and sick - and there's plenty of evidence that it was exactly this intervention that led to the diabetes epidemic we're currently faced with.
I guess the extreme in this example would be more and more people being considered poor and eligible for food stamps, and thus more and more people under the government's micromanaging. Unlikely, perhaps.... But if we really do turn into a society with a small upper crust and a large underclass, it amounts to the elites telling the plebs exactly what they may and may not eat.