Government eyes student's diet, where's the privacy?

There is a new project being implemented in San Antonio, Texas, which will allow the state to monitor what schoolchildren eat. Not what they are served, but what they actually eat. The system will have bar-coded lunchtrays for each student. Cameras placed in the lunchroom will capture images of which foods, and how much, are selected by the student, and also images of what is on the tray when the food is dicarded. Computer imaging software will then determine the types and quantity of food consumed by a student, so that a profile can be generated for each student.

At this point, the system is "opt-in", but then, it's only the pilot project. However, the potential ramifications of such a project should frighten any American who wants to live in a free society. For those who live in Quadrant I, diet, as with other activities, is a matter of personal responsibility, primarily to one's self rather than the government. Quadrant I is based on personal moral responsibility; society works because people have a desire to improve themselves, and the collective result of self improvement is a functional society. This is why there is such a different concept of privacy in Quadrant I. In a moral society, it can be presumed that you are acting for moral reasons. In essence, citizens police themselves and can be considered innocent until proven guilty.

For those whose political philosophies place them in the socialist areas of Quadrant III communism or Quadrant IV fascism, this is an ideal type of system. It is a basic tenet of such philosophies that the government knows what you need better than you do; the government has trained specialists, after all, who do nothing but think about your well-being all day long. Therefore, it isn't surprising to see NYC issuing rules on salt intake at restaurants, or to hear people like Bill Clinton or Michelle Obama talking about the need for government control of diet as a solution to the national rise in obesity. In any socialist society, personal morality is irrelevant. Your actions must be for the 'politically correct' reasons, which are both dictated and policed by the government. You must continually prove yourself; any attempt to conceal any action or any failure to explain an action is "hiding something" and presumptive evidence of guilt. You can still have a "presumption of innocence", but it degenerates to mean nothing more than a civilized facade of procedural due process.

Systems such as this train children to believe they cannot be responsible for even the littlest thing, not even feeding themselves. While these systems are the darlings of the socialist, they demolish any attempt at teaching the moral skill of self reliance needed to support a traditional American society.