‘Why Do They Hate Us?’

Michael Barone’s condemnation of the New York Times’s latest, “Why Do They Hate Us?” Opinion, June 26, 2006], puts me in mind of Golda Meir’s comment: “The Arabs will make peace with us only when they love their children more than they hate us.”

Paraphrasing for the Times’s editors: “They will come to their senses only when they love their country more than they hate George W. Bush.”

BRIAN M. ROM
Manhattan

‘McBans’

Elizabeth M. Whelan makes some great points about the ridiculousness of the proposal by New York City Councilman Joel Rivera to use zoning laws to limit the number of fast-food restaurants in the Big Apple [“Futile McBans,” Opinion, June 26, 2006]. However, regardless of whether Mr. Rivera’s proposal is “effective,” it is unfortunate that such an attack on consumer choice and free enterprise would even be considered.

While most concede that obesity is a problem in this country, the government has no business interfering with one’s choice of food, much less a marketplace that responds to the wants and needs of its customers. People who are under time constraints, financial limitations, or perhaps even in need of a high caloric diet, should be allowed to choose where to eat. Once government begins to regulate our choice in food, what’s next? Indeed, that slippery slope falls to unlimited possibilities of government control.

SCOTT WAGNER
Research Associate
Center for Individual Freedom (www.cfif.org)
Alexandria, Va.

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