Posted on 09/22/2009 12:53:49 AM PDT by Still Thinking
We’ve covered a multitude of arguments against soda taxes. Speaking recently at the Rotary Club of Atlanta, Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent gave his own take (and perhaps the pithiest argument yet):
"I have never seen it work where a government tells people what to eat and what to drink. If it worked, the Soviet Union would still be around."
Today, Investor’s Business Daily noted the significance behind the quote:
Muhtar Kent knows a thing or two about guts. His father was a Turkish diplomat who in 1943 risked his life physically intervening to save 80 Turkish Jews, as cattle cars railroaded them from Marseille to a Nazi concentration camp.
So when your father has defied the Gestapo, maybe standing up to Uncle Sam is a piece of cake. With the president considering a tax on sodas and other non-diet soft drinks to fund Congress' designs on the health care system, and to try to reduce obesity, the Coke chairman refused to go flat.
Coca Cola is probably one of the few companies to really outperform in this market. A tax on it would be stupid, but then again I don’t really like that public schools sell this stuff.
Yeah, me either, but I don’t think they have any business regulating what the kids can bring for their own consumption, which some schools do try to do. I was raised to think that a soda was an occasional treat, not all that good for you, but if you have one once a week or so with a burger or taco, it’s fun and won’t kill you. As a result I probably drink two sodas a month. The parents need to be teaching the kids, rather than the schools teaching them that a village of busybodies is what’s needed.
If people let government decide what foods they eat and
what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in
as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under
tyranny.
Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)
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