Last month, the New York City Board of Health voted to require chain restaurants to publish warnings when menu items contain more than the...

You can respond to this in at least two different ways.  You can say that the restaurant association is correct, or you can say that it is overreacting.  I will lay out arguments for both sides and you can make your own decision.

On the one hand, you can say that the restaurant association is right to criticize the government.  When the government imposes regulations like these, it does make things harder on restaurants.  Now, the restaurants will have to spend money and resources determining which of their foods have more than 2300 miligrams of salt in the amount that is served to a given customer.  This will eat into their profit margins, which are already not that high.

In addition, you can say that the government is making it less likely that people will want to eat at these restaurants.  Up until now, people have been content to eat the restaurant food.  Now, they are more likely to balk at eating because they will see the little warning symbols and think that the restaurant food is bad for them.  In these ways, the government is imposing rules that consumers don’t really want.  Those rules will increase the costs to the restaurants while, at the same time, reducing their ability to sell their meals.

On the other hand, you can argue that this regulation does not impose any real and unreasonable harm on restaurants.  Instead, all it does is to inform consumers.  While the restaurants will have to determine how much salt is in their food, this will not take too much in the way of resources.  Big chain restaurants typically know exactly what is in their foods because they are making things the exact same way every time.  They will have to determine the salt level one time, which will not take much time or money.

More importantly, what the government is requiring is not unreasonable.  It is only telling the restaurants to inform consumers about what they are eating.  It leaves people free to make their own choices, but gives them more information on which to base their decisions. From this point of view, we can say that it cannot possibly be bad to have to tell consumers what they are eating.  If a restaurant is afraid that consumers will refuse to buy if they know what is in the food, the restaurant deserves to lose money.

Which of these arguments makes more sense to you?