The rational economic agent is fictional, of course.
The problem with leaping to grand conclusions on that basis is that you must first establish that whatever putative replacement you want to propose is actually better than what people are already doing in the aggregate, and not merely theoretically better. Given that you have the same raw material to work with as the economy as a whole (irrational agents), this is a great deal harder than people are willing to admit. For instance, the very popular "regulate it" answer generally completely ignores the high likelihood that the irrational regulators will simply rigidly lock in some irrational answer; "regulators" or "government" are simply assumed or asserted to be somehow rational, even though it consists of the same irrational agents as anything else. (Bearing in mind that we are generally talking about sorts of irrationality that are difficult or impossible to eliminate with "education", education itself coming from other irrational agents, and with incentive structures in place to embrace irrationality if it suits an agenda.)
I'm a libertarian primarily because I believe letting people choose, then experience the consequences, then communicate with each other in a free society about those consequences, is the fastest way for both the individual and the society to learn about what works and does not. Anything else extends the feedback loop, impeding its functionality, and in many cases, such as the regulated irrationality, actively destroys it entirely.
I'm not a libertarian "despite" the irrationality of the public, I'm a libertarian because of it. If people could be counted on to be perfectly rational and logical, that's when the whole "regulate everything" would be logical and correct; we could assume the regulators were cold and rational in their choices and therefore it's rational to offload judgment to them, because we'd come to the same decisions they would anyhow. But that's not the world we live in.
Getting back to the original topic, I currently consider it highly likely that nutrition is precisely one of those cases, and if it does turn out that nutrition has been grossly wrong, the damage done by it is literally one of the top five crimes against humanity in the 20th century in terms of death and destruction. And to emphasize, yes, I mean fully literally; millions upon millions upon millions of cases of preventable "metabolic syndrome", a passionless name for a horrific, life-altering and life-destroying disease, even before it kills you decades before your time. I'm still waiting to see how it all plays out but someday this is likely to be considered one of the greatest failings of irrational agents being allowed to regulate individuals in the history of mankind. In the meantime, I strongly commend to everyone to read up on all sides of these issues and come to their own conclusions; your life depends on it.
The problem with leaping to grand conclusions on that basis is that you must first establish that whatever putative replacement you want to propose is actually better than what people are already doing in the aggregate, and not merely theoretically better. Given that you have the same raw material to work with as the economy as a whole (irrational agents), this is a great deal harder than people are willing to admit. For instance, the very popular "regulate it" answer generally completely ignores the high likelihood that the irrational regulators will simply rigidly lock in some irrational answer; "regulators" or "government" are simply assumed or asserted to be somehow rational, even though it consists of the same irrational agents as anything else. (Bearing in mind that we are generally talking about sorts of irrationality that are difficult or impossible to eliminate with "education", education itself coming from other irrational agents, and with incentive structures in place to embrace irrationality if it suits an agenda.)
I'm a libertarian primarily because I believe letting people choose, then experience the consequences, then communicate with each other in a free society about those consequences, is the fastest way for both the individual and the society to learn about what works and does not. Anything else extends the feedback loop, impeding its functionality, and in many cases, such as the regulated irrationality, actively destroys it entirely.
I'm not a libertarian "despite" the irrationality of the public, I'm a libertarian because of it. If people could be counted on to be perfectly rational and logical, that's when the whole "regulate everything" would be logical and correct; we could assume the regulators were cold and rational in their choices and therefore it's rational to offload judgment to them, because we'd come to the same decisions they would anyhow. But that's not the world we live in.
Getting back to the original topic, I currently consider it highly likely that nutrition is precisely one of those cases, and if it does turn out that nutrition has been grossly wrong, the damage done by it is literally one of the top five crimes against humanity in the 20th century in terms of death and destruction. And to emphasize, yes, I mean fully literally; millions upon millions upon millions of cases of preventable "metabolic syndrome", a passionless name for a horrific, life-altering and life-destroying disease, even before it kills you decades before your time. I'm still waiting to see how it all plays out but someday this is likely to be considered one of the greatest failings of irrational agents being allowed to regulate individuals in the history of mankind. In the meantime, I strongly commend to everyone to read up on all sides of these issues and come to their own conclusions; your life depends on it.