Perhaps you should read about Catharism or one of the many other Catholic Cursades? The fact is, the Catholic Church has engaged in plenty of purges and multiple "councils" to discuss matters of the faith, eventually deciding "the one true way" and burning/killing the heretics who kept going. Most Protestants are so far removed from these decisions that once you actually start reading some of the decisions, you start to see how many people you've met in your life are at least partial believers in at least one of the "heretical" ideas.

You see, the point isn't that the Catholic Church is per se some evil organization. It's that people just presume a lot of their own personal beliefs are (a) similar to others or (b) at least tolerable enough if they have the same "core" beliefs--and it's only after they start really talking that the find out differently. Hence, Protestants have had their own purgings--not always any less bloody than the Catholic kind. They've just had fewer years to have a long history of it. So, the very idea that the US is all some sort of happy Christian family, even as a majority, I think is rather ludicrous. And the more that we actually focus on being "Christian", the more only the "true" Christians will be tolerated.

Hence, the very notion of bring up the point is an act of intolerance is the slippery slope to the same inquisitions that supposedly were the foundation of "Freedom of Religion" in the US. No, the truth is that no denomination had the monopoly on power to reign, so everyone agreed to a sort of truce. And for that, I despise any attempt to pretend or grant any religion a consideration as a majority because any group, religious or not, should not reign. Oh, and, yea, that's why I'm against monarchies too. :)

The point is that to explain altruism, one has to -- um -- show that it isn't really altruism.

No, the problem is that "to explain altruism" is taken to mean "altruism is the effect of something else". Yet the very definition of altruism is that it is an act without cause. Trying to explain altruism is like trying to explain random acts of violence. The truth is, a lot of acts aren't altruistic or random. And understanding those situations can help you know how to cause more or less of the desired behavior. But, clearly, there's plenty of altruism (and random acts of violence) in the world. I just find it sad that people are so quick to want people to justify their charity and that people don't respond appropriately: because.

Your first reason is why it should flatten out -- $100 on $5000 can be argued to be much more of a burden than $10,000 on $500,000, but I don't see how $100,000 on $5,000,000 is so much more of a burden than $1,000,000 on $50,000,000.

Probably because you've got it the other way around? Logical converses aren't always true. The point is that a higher tax rate is a lower burden on progressively higher earners. Sometimes a higher tax rate is a lower burner on progressively lower earners as well and sometimes not. So, in the specific case, it might just do as well to increase the tax rate on the highest earners, period. But the more stratification, the safer it is to bump up the highest bracket without but marginal negative effects.

Your second reason, I think, is simply invalid. One can accept that taxes are necessary without assuming that the government is the best spender of money in general.

Apparently you didn't read my note? Regardless of whether the government is the best spender of money in general, obviously the wealthy are not--there's simply no means for the wealthy to carry out such activities as well as the government can. Look no further than JP Morgan's failure to stem the Great Depression vs how the Federal Reserve (technically not a part of the government, but that's mostly a moot point) and Federal Stimulus were able to prevent another Great Depression. Simply put, a cabal of billionaires couldn't borrow trillions of dollars because they aren't in the position to, if necessary, extract that sort of money out of all the other billionaires who would otherwise be unwilling to contribute (and even then, all those billionaries together don't have the money nor the credit to borrow that sort of money). That latter point is a big one, anyways, since clearly a lot of people who earn that sort of money feel it's their money and aren't willing to give it to others.

Your third reason is simply the assumption that CEOs are overpaid and should have their "excess" compensation drained.

That's basic supply and demand. The price of a good isn't determine because of any classical definition of worth but often almost completely by entirely outside factors. Yet it's unreasonable to have some sort of communistic or socialistic system because that fucks up how supply/demand is auto-correcting. At the same time, to argue that actors, sports stars, CEOs, etc "deserve" the money is only accurate in an obtuse sense of the word "deserve". By the same token, it's not that the government "deserves" the money and is extracting it for that reason. The fundamental issue is there's plenty of situations where no one is really responsible for or deserving of circumstance. In the end, society has decided to assign government--in the US, a democratic republic--to handle those sorts of externalities. To that end, the tax code is the basis for it because it's already established from above that government funding has to come from somewhere and the high end earners are the most capable of supplying funds anyways.

I'm pretty sure no one knows what the shape of the Laffer curve is.

Not the exact shape, no. I'm just going on what I recall of a study that examined various places with different tax rates and the basic tipping point at which revenue actually started going down was around the 50% mark. But, yea, maybe that was just a local maximum.

That doesn't really make any sense. Progressive taxation is meant to:

• Shift the burden on to the people most capable of paying it--$100 in taxes on a person making $5,000/year is more of a burden than $100 in taxes on a person making $50,000,000/year
• Stratifies taxation for common use based on diminishing marginal return--a person making $50,000,000/year won't likely put a lot of it to good social use and has a harder and harder time spending it well (see "Brewster's Millions" for some idea of the concept) while government can do good things with it*
• Some sense of justice (what this whole article is about) that uncorrelated reward is a much better target for taxation--that whether you make $1,000,000/year as a CEO or $10,000,000/year as a CEO has more to do with your industry than likely your performance and further CEOs in general earn a disproportion amount relative to their duties (and let's not forget old money that makes money without real work), so if taxation is going to happen anyways, there's reason to focus more and more on higher and higher earners

In short, I see nothing that would indicate that the tax rate has a specific reason to flatten out at higher levels except that at some point you want to make sure it never goes to 100% inherently (effectively with inflation is another matter). Honestly, from what I recall about the Laffer curve, if revenue was the chief concern then one should target a maximum of 50%. That still leaves plenty of room given the current tax brackets.

*This sort of leads into a tangent about exactly what government spends the money on or if it's doing a good job, but that's orthogonal to the type of tax system. Invalid/improper spending only supports a lower tax rate at every level, not a flat or regressive tax system.

So, um, tax them whenever they buy the stock option and later sell the stock (like I said, this presumes getting rid of capital gains)? As for other "non-cash mechanisms", for the most part those are legally income as well and one is legally required to pay taxes on those as well--exceptions being if you itemize your deductions and can claim an expensive item as one of your exemptions or otherwise a related business expense, but that doesn't get you very far. So, I'm not sure how that really counters the point of more income tax brackets.

France's income taxes are pretty comparable to US income taxes and...oh, right, you're talking about "wealth taxes". Well, sorry to break it to you, but the US already has an effective wealth tax*. It's called the Federal Reserve's policy of maintaining a positive inflation rate. Such inherently devalues all wealth. The only way to recoup the effective loss is through further income which will be taxed already on a progressive scale. So, to maintain your wealth you have to not only beat inflation every year but do so after taxes. Ie, it gets harder the more wealth you have. My suggestion just makes it even harder, which hypothetically should spur more risky/profitable investments by the wealth.

*Yes, not all wealth is stored in dollars or some liquid asset, but while most assets will follow inflation, it's a gamble no matter how diversified you are that your total physical assets will average up. Own too much real estate and a mortgage crisis can see your wealth. Same with too many stocks in one industry or any industry if the stock market tanks. In short, there's no safe way to squirrel away 100% of your assets and given the return ratio on a lot of things (after taxes) vs inflation, you'd likely want to invest a significant amount of your assets anyways instead of wholly hedging on consistent inflation in your physical holdings.

In any case, France can't take the same approach since they don't own the Euro mint and it's definitely questionable on taxing all their wealth equally--although one can look at "The Tenant Game" to understand how vast land ownership can be bad as well. And I did note the point about making sure taxes can't go over ~80/90% of income but that's of course based upon a presumed of positive inflation. Perhaps France is just not taking chances?

It seems to me the bigger point is simply that the progressive tax system, which is meant to capture a lot of the diminishing marginal returns on such ridiculous pay, isn't setup to actually scale to the rates discussed. As it stands, the highest US tax bracket is in the 450,000+ range. Yet the pay range being discussed is in the multi-millions. Considering how the tax pay scale currently is setup, it'd seem that tax brackets should automatically extend as pay goes up*. So long as it's eventually an asymptotic at some point (say at 80 or 90%), then it shouldn't really matter too much how much people are paid.

Oh, and yea, this does presume that capital gains are no longer treated special and that money laundering through loans on stock or similar is harshly punished as tax evasion--ie, actually jail time.

*Something like low_bracket(x) = (x == 0) ? 0 : 16000*2^(x-1)+1, high_bracket(x) = 16000*2^x, tax_rate(x) = (x >= 16) ? 90% : 10%*5%*x; and yea, this doesn't consider the complexity of marriage and such so it's obviously not so simple, but for those curious the above reaches 90% at $524 million+. Feel free to play around with the rates if you'd rather see an asymptotic rate at closer to 50% or at different cut off. Never the less, the idea that all rich people are treated the same and yet there's much more effort to sub-divide the upper middle class (the poor and lower middle class seem well grouped) in the current tax code does tell you something.

My hypothesis is that people are primarily interested in promoting their bias, whether that's conscious or based simply in their desire to reproduce what they know.. It's so much easier to dump what's in your head than perform research.

And...so "what they know" is their bias? A businessman that knows and writes about business is biased? He's not, just, oh, experienced? You see, you're mixing up bias, knowledge, experience, etc into a blender and then complaining about certain parts while ignoring the rest. But, all things considered, I'd trust more a person who knows a subject and will devote their time to it than a person who knows a subject and will spam, through money, to have his knowledge put in place. I say this primarily because there are people (and their companies) with insanely disproportionate amounts of money to spam their views.

What do you mean by this? Are you strawmanning or am I missing the point? Paying someone doesn't necessarily exchange one bias on Wikipedia for another - the person being paid might not have written on Wikipedia anyway, or they might have agreed with what they're being paid to write. Paying someone to edit Wikipedia is just separating the task of choosing what to say from the technical job of writing - a skill which most Wikipedia editors sorely lack.

You are missing the point. You argue everyone has a bias and then seem to overlook that the person being paid has a bias. Yet obviously the whole contention is precisely that the person paid is usually not being paid to write on their bias, as most people so interested would be writing in it already or at best are being financial supported for their views--open source developers being supported comes to mind and that sort of patron system is the exception to the rule. But such is obviously a distorting based on money and the vast majority of such financial interests are more about writing in support of things that go against one's own biases--or at least one would otherwise be neutral about. The end result is, of course, precisely to shift the bias to the buyer's position and there's no real reason to believe that because one person has more money they're inherently more right, so there's no real basis to view money as any sort of equalizer--without specific exceptions proven, of course.

Rubbish. Suggesting that people have equal copious free time is as absurd as suggesting that society is egalitarian. ...

I never suggested that at all. I stated everyone has equal, approximately, total time in their life--there are, of course, major exceptions for some people. That one person has "free time" more than another is a choice they make. Hence, it's more fair if not more egalitarian.

Your 25 year old intelligent, unemployed person living at home (please take that as a description, not an insult) has all day to contribute - your full-time office workers with 2 kids might reasonably have half an hour every evening.

And? Your full-time office workers with 2 kids aren't the people who are spamming Wikipedia. It's the full-time office workers's company owners who make 300x the wage of the office worker--and the office worker makes 2-3x what a lot of people make. So, the 1-2% of the population have an effective monetary voice of 300-600x their size, presuming they can find "your 25-year-old intelligent, [now employed] person living at home [who] has all day to contribute". Not only are they now doing nothing more productive than they were before, but they're not allowing for money to distort the discussion way more than "free time" can--just some simple math, but even your simple example only has the unemployed person who never sleeps only being able to distort at a 48:1 ratio.

The "basement dweller" and the "fast writer" can always decide to engage in a war of attrition and win, because their decisions about where to focus fixed units of time either affect them less or have greater impact.

And if you care enough, you too can fight a war of attrition. That's pretty fair. It's a much more doable choice than earning 300x what you currently make to pay a bunch of previous basement dwellers to espouse your views.

I am glad you put this bit in here because this is exactly how I see Wikipedia: as an MMORPG with arbitrary rules. I don't see any problem with people having to play a game by the rules, but they shouldn't then pretend that it's anything more than a game.

Life is a game with permanent death. And playing by the rules, you can still be an asshole. In this case, the rules were instituted to avoid some asshole behavior. It's not perfect because there are invariably going to situations where people have a legitimate reason to want to break the rules, but I'd stand by the point that the rules are a reasonably fair approach to the problems of allowing commercial interests to edit war.

"Notability not truth" and "volunteer democracy" (i.e. truth by consensus of people with the most time to waste) are what undermines Wikipedia as a reliable source of information.

No, it undermines Wikipedia as a complete source of information. Now, one could interject some comment about requiring a "complete picture" to have a reliable source, but the completeness in question is that an article about X is incomplete. It's that article Y just doesn't exist, nor do a lot of articles like Y because they're not "notable". Well, that's life. Anything less than a raw dump of everything involves some sort of filter process, so unless you're asking for that, at some level--and I think Wikipedia mostly gets it right--you want a filtration process of "notable" vs merely "facts". As for "volunteer democracy", well, everything else is some sort of tyranny*.

EVERYONE is biased. If someone pays to express their bias on Wikipedia, all they're doing is paying for the time to compete.

Uh... Everyone is biased. Person A and B are biased. Person A pays person B to express person A's opinion on Wikipedia and..hmm..why exactly is it that person A has any standing to complain/sue if person B just does whatever the fuck they want again in pursuing their bias? Oh, right, somehow you're silently acknowledging that as much as everyone is biased, they can quell their own bias in one area in exchange for bias in another area: money. In short, you rather undermine your implication about Wikipedia having some sort of pre-constructed bias because obviously people can act beyond their innate biases.

This may make things worse, better, or change nothing much at all, depending on whether the paid-for bias is more or less truthy than other bias.

Well, history has shown that it tends to make things worse. Why? Because there's basically three situations: (a) money is used to make good things look bad, but that doesn't tend to have a feedback cycle except with monopolies and even they tend to crumble after a long enough time if they depend on smearing everyone else, (b) money is made to make unrelated things look good/bad/neutral, which just is unrelated and has no real feedback cycle, or (c) money is used to make bad things look good, which can fundamentally change the expectations of people and has a great feedback cycle--it's why ads are still such a major financial investment by companies even though ads so rarely do anything but, directly or indirectly, try to make their product look good (implying it isn't already). But, yea, let's just pretend that feedback cycles don't exist or we don't have a history to base predictions upon or that all situations are equally probable.

*There's a reason I bolded the parts I did and jump off here. You seem to be complaining about one of the few true democracies that exist: one related to the devotion of one's time. Time and money aren't synonymous. Instead of leaving it to the owner of a company to personal have an edit war with one or more people, wasting their "precious" time, they can buy off people to do the work for them. Yet, time is the great equalizer. Everyone has their own and you can't give it to anyone else. But just like votes or "campaign contributions", money can try to buy it from others. In essence, you fundamental complaint is that Wikimedia strives to maintain the one true equalizer that the internet was, in many ways, envisioned to bring by allowing everyone their own voice. And you even complain about "everyone is biased", as if they shouldn't be. Yet you think money can or should be used in some fashion to magical erase that bias. In short, you make no sense.

PS - If you want to compete, use your own time just like everyone else can. Next up you'll be bitching that most MMORPG players are against being able to buy level-up potions and unbalancing weapons and that money is some magic equalizer there too. Make up your mind if you want to compete and play the game or buy your way out of having to play the game.

Everyone I have ever met says they have simple taxes. ... You really need to read the paperwork that you are sent because many people take a chintzy $350 job helping their cousin cater a banquet ...

Well, there you go. Seriously, $350 to cater a banquet? How about a carry-in? Or being "paid" with a free meal? It sounds like you live in a different social circle than the majority of people.

I'm not saying the system isn't with its flaws, but saying you'd rather have the government do it for you "for free" just shows that 1) you're ignorant of how things work in the real world,

The point isn't about it being "for free" per se or not. It's that to get to the point of accepting a tax return online and reviewing its accuracy at a fundamental level, the IRS already has to (or at least, should be) correlate all the known information about the filer in the first place. Ie, you're already 99.9% of the way there of just automating the rest and filling in the spots calculated for exemptions, adjusted income, etc. So to specifically exempt this rather obvious option seems to be of specific design.

and 2) you don't have a firm grasp on why barriers to government involvement in private industry exist (hint: anti-totalitarianism).

Nope. See, the tax code is already pretty damn simple for the vast majority of people. That's precisely why the 1040-EZ form was created. It's the claim of anti-totalitarianism that's used to justify a way to "funnel gov't money to their buddies in private industry" when it misses the point that nothing about the above of *allowing* government involvement inherent leads to totalitarianism--inherently is the point since the whole tax code is a government construct which makes the whole idea of government totalitarianism against its own tax code is circular.

Most people don't have a good grasp on 1) or 2) anyways so your comment doesn't surprise me. And if you're going to argue against 2), why not take it to the next level and just nationalize any industry that bridges the private/public gap - which is pretty much where we're going anyways.

Because the private/public gap in the tax code exists (1) for people who actually need to utilize features of the tax code involving areas of dispute (figuring out if an item is an asset or a liability, if it's income or not, if its cost can be spread out over multiple years, etc) especially to ease all the fundamental concerns of businesses which deal in much larger dollar values and hence have to be either (a) a separate tax code for businesses (which is more or less the effect of different forms) or (b) simply no taxes on businesses (which is enough of a loophole that the tax code becomes meaningless) or (2) to prop up previous, pre-digital tax services that did all the above mentioned auto-calculate stuff that now can (and likely must) be trivial done by the IRS's online services anyways. And since a vast majority of people so heavily fall into (b), there's good reason why the IRS should be a directly available option.

The false dichotomy that is this thread ignores the really obvious solution: don't have a tax code so damn complicated.

That's pretty much impossible. Yes, the tax code has been made intentionally more complicated to the ends of social engineering, but putting that aside and you're still left with trying to define "income" in some fashion that can't be somehow fundamentally worked around without crippling the ability of businesses to function. The general solution for most people is obvious: they're employed by someone else and are paid wages, of which all details of such have to be reported to the IRS. Hence, they functionally already live in a bubble of an uncomplicated tax code.

The right doesn't want that because they want to funnel gov't money to their buddies in private industry and the left doesn't want that because a population not dependent upon them is much harder to control. I haven't heard anyone say we need a complicated tax code to protect the free market and capitalism, but the Feds have a track record of using the tax code as a weapon of last resort against citizens it finds uncooperative

Uh, no. The right uses the tax code to social engineer families to stay together, to reward certain types of businesses, etc. The left uses the tax code to punish certain types of businesses (and sometimes reward others). Even without that, businesses fundamentally operate differently than people: people must consume resources to live and use most of the rest for their own enjoyment while businesses can functionally consume no resources for decades and are profit motivated. But businesses are also fundamentally made up of people and could be trivially used as tax shelters--as they are now. Hence it's seemingly necessary to figure out how best to distribute the tax burden* and that inherently turns into complicated language to avoid a lot of loopholes. Having said that, yes, it'd be preferable that new loopholes were intentionally put in the tax code.

Can't we all just agree that the tax system is ridiculous and fix that first and THEN decide if we want the citizens to pay the gov't to provide it as a service to its citizens?

Yes on the former. On the later, we already inherently are doing 99.9% of that already for some 50%+ of the tax population (probably a lot more). But since the tax code is so easy--or loophole free--for so many people, private tax preparers go out of their way to exaggerate the effective complexity and pretend that their target are the small, high salary, percentage of people who have complex asset portfolios were a person is likely to do a better job than an automated system. I think it's that part which disgusts me and the GP.

In the end, it's all a matter of whether the IRS will accept completed standards forms or not. So long as they will, then the idea of some sort of IRS tyranny because they'll let you accept an IRS auto-generated 1040-EZ form is just sill. Now, other parts of the government in other circumstances? That's up to specific debate to consider.

*Whether you fill the tax burden is too high or too low, the fact is that spending is obviously very high and needs to be paid for. And as much as people call for massive spending cuts, no one seem to be calling for an end to most government programs. So, in the end, the big question on the tax side is how to best distribute the load. And given all things, a progressive tax system seems to be the most sane. As for specific details? Well, that's rather complicated. Hence a complicated tax code.

It's not a coincidence that when you read about people who ran into burning buildings to save a bunch of children, or saw a car run off the road, lept from their car to go assist... everyday heroes tend to have one thing in their background: They grew up in a small town. Go look it up. And surprise, most people who join the military also come from small towns.

Perhaps you're confusing cause and effect? Small towns have shitty building codes and horrible drivers. People from small towns would do anything to escape, including join the military.

Their personalities are no different than those in the city, but their social environment imparted certain values -- specifically, that they're not just a face in a crowd. In the city, we choose our own subculture, our own groups to be a part of. In a small town, you have to learn how to be part of a community you may not strongly identify with. Avoiding certain types of people isn't an option. So as a consequence of that, we get people who later move to the big city or whatever, and retain that sense of community... so when they see someone in trouble, they don't have a tribalistic view.

Um, did you actually grow up in a small town? Because about everything you just said was wrong from my experience. I'd argue it's not the sense of community that has anything to do with it but that in small towns there's little room for stratification of classes. To move to a large city after growing up in a small town is likely to result in one being surrounded by similar class people--be it you living in a ghetto or a "good" neighborhood--and its still that which defines their behavior. Ie, they moved from one small town to another in their mind.

Nah, the GP's observation is correct probably for the bigger truth: most poor stay poor. Those who don't often want to forget that life and will readily accept they earned their new position and hence everyone else "below" them doesn't deserve charity. Honestly, I'd imagine the rich born could empathize more through, as you almost suggest, a tragic life event--being forced to be poor by a parent for a while might do the trick.

And I'd say the converse of that holds as well. Consider how many people live off of $35,000/year (gross income)--not even nearly poor--and the reaction you see from so many people on /. about how "hard" it is to live off twice as much for a salary. Certainly locality has something to do with it, but that doesn't explain the rich or very rich for which no locality is so expensive that they ever have a "hard" time living off what they earn. Instead, they have a hard time seeing any real benefit to giving to others. It's easy to understand why, too. If giving just means more people asking for more, with a lot the people able to live fine without the money, it's hard to remain charitable or focus on the people who really need the money.

But, then you start to ask if they "deserve" the money. Well, no, probably not. But, then, did you "deserve" the money, either? A poor person who suddenly is paid well can begin to really appreciate that question, but when you're wrapped into the ideas of capitalism and the theory behind it without really considering its practical effects, you have people who have a very warped concept of the word "deserve". Add to this the idea that everything has to work on incentive--as if the poor would suddenly all become well-fed multi-millionaries if they only tried harder--, and it's little wonder that charity "begins at home" a lot more than it is out helping random strangers.

It's one of the reason why it's hard to take most rich people seriously when they give to charity. I'll give Bill Gates some credit for the point that he seems to have vision and knows enough about strategy to get things done. I don't particularly question his motives or necessarily his methods--you should see the sort of things the Salvation Army will sell*, for example. That said, a large part of Bill Gates' success with Microsoft was Steve Ballmer--a businessman who could work that part of the relationship. I presume that Gates needs someone similar in the charitable space to actually succeed in a significant way. Who that person might be, I don't know.

*This weekend, I happened across a copy of Carmageddon at a Salvation Army, so that was interesting.

So...up until now trans-fat haven't been banned. Yet TBHQ *is* in foods already. Which means your health is already threatened and manufacturers are already taking away the food you can eat without winding up in an emergency room. So, you're quite happy with the current situation where you have to be very careful and just read the accurate labelled foods? Because banning trans-fats doesn't per se force anyone from using more TBHQ, although it makes it sounds like it'll make it more likely. But if you're already okay with the current situation, I don't see why banning trans-fats per se is an issue for you.

Btw, your analogy about "forcing someone with a peanut allergy to eat peanuts" is obviously flawed. No one forced or is forcing people to eat "peanuts". But a ban does make it more likely foods may contain "peanuts" and that "[accurate] food [labels]" will be something more "peanut allergy" suffers will have to pay attention to. In the end, though, manufacturers are the ones who choose "peanuts" and effectively "[take] away the foods [you] can eat" as obviously "peanuts" aren't the only option.

Besides, if anything your argument says more about banning TBHQ (or maybe peanuts) for its serious health effects, even if its only on a minority of people. Of course peanuts have noticeable health benefits and there's no major downside for most people, while AFAIK neither TBHQ nor trans-fats have any direct health benefits and are replaceable with substances with similar positive effective and fewer negatives. In any case, while it's nice to believe you can rely upon accurate labels for everything, at some level it would seem that banning substances closer to a poison than a food makes more sense. I presume the real reason peanuts aren't banned is cultural, in any case (like cigarettes), and even then peanuts include special labelling.

Perhaps I'd feel differently if (a) manufacturers were banned from any advertisement/prominent display of 0 trans fat or low trans fat and instead (b) manufacturers were required to prominently display their artificial trans fat usage--the swap being to reduce confusion on the subject and provide a sort of notification/shame on the usae. But, then, that might have near the same effect as a ban, so I'm not you'd be content with that; I mean, peanuts aren't really *that* prominently labelled on products.

Mandate that any product containing trans fat be labeled as such,

How about labeling any "product"--nice word there--containing trans fat be labeled as non-food, not-fit-for-human-consumption? You're already most of the way there when you acknowledge that trans fat fries are more a "product" than "food".

... and with appropriate health warnings (like they do on tobacco products), but outright bans of things we can only use to harm ourselves is anathema to liberty.

So, forcing special labeling isn't anathema to liberty? I guess you could argue that trans fat isn't food and hence products containing it would be committing fraud to include it, but that falls into the land of civil lawsuit, non-predefined law. After all, if products don't include the special labeling, what is the likely response? Ban the product. Although that'd likely be a quasi-after-the-fact judges order, so that'd be quite a bit different, really.

Honestly, nothing the FDA does as far as "banning" trans fat is going to stop you from, at home, consuming as much trans fat as you like or prevent companies from selling trans fat as non-food. It does have an affect on commercial enterprises, hence why you speak of a "product", but it's been long established that labeling and even outright bans (after getting a judge's order to carry it out) on food or other products are acceptable because of the cold-hearted exploitation possible through companies and the glacier speed at which fraud lawsuits would have an effect.

Now, perhaps you'd have a more valid point if you were discussing barter rules outside the framework of the protective legal code with currency, of which the FDA rules almost certainly apply. Because once you accept you live in a rather massive framework of regulation on conduct including the power to ban harmful products, then it's rather hard to act too shocked about the loss of liberty. Besides, beyond the theoretical aspect of it, the practical point is trans fat is a shitty way for companies to cut costs and that's it. Your statement has as much logic as the FDA not banning motor oil in food and leaving it up to labeling for people to decide. That's just stupid, not because people can't decide or we want to prevent people from consciously consuming motor oil, but because it's ridiculous to grant mass producers of what we eat to have the sort of power to taint the food supply and leave it up to a civil lawsuit to deal with things.