Ezra Klein

on the other hand a desire for endless control over your own body and future can be mentally poisonous too because you can't control it the great insight of buddhism is that you know desire and craving are the root of suffering and you know the more we trick ourselves into believing we can control what will happen to us then when things do happen to us we feel like we failed

I feel like I've heard this argument as long as I've been touching this issue, which like, as you know, the beginning of my career as a healthcare reporter, you know, we would debate food deserts and what would happen if we put, you know, good grocery stores in food deserts and we did this in a bunch of places and it didn't really work.

I've become very cynical about this.

I mean, yes, it would be much better if everybody was wrapped around with more walkable places to live and better and healthy foods.

I don't think you should be able to advertise junk food at all to children.

I think it should be illegal to have Paw Patrol on kids' cereals.

I think this whole thing where we allow endless advertising children is completely insane and it makes every parent's life in the grocery store a nightmare, myself included.

And for the society at large, I think the problem is people want things that aren't good for them.

But people don't want you to do enough.

The people who vote.

Like this happened in New York.

Bloomberg wanted to tax sodas.

They almost ran them out of town on a rail.

I think you would need a level of paternalism for that.

I guess what I would say about it is that there is not a single jurisdiction in this entire country where the politics of that have worked.

We cannot point at one thing, one place, one state, one city where we've been able to do that much.

If it were there to do, I would be the first one to say we should do it.

But I don't think it's there to do.

Like the public health community, we tried to get people to take vaccines in the aftermath or the math during a deadly pandemic.

And it led to the largest public health backlash in my lifetime.