The reminder of the 480 calories packed into a 16 oz. White Chocolate Frappuccino will turn my drive to Starbucks from being a pursuit of happiness into a 1.96-mile guilt trip. Both ways.

Beginning in 2014, all chain restaurants and food vendors with at least 20 locations nationwide will be required to display the caloric content of their food on menus – including those at the drive-thru.

Naturally the day in which all Americans understand exactly what they are consuming will be gloomy and bleak. The issue at large however is that the public is being forced to do so not by the restaurants themselves but by the federal government.

This smaller provision of the health-care reformation (formally acknowledged as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) demonstrates the motive behind the rising opposition to governmental authority. more simply than any critique of the Obama administration involving the term “socialism”.

Whereas I merely complain to friends in disgust of the ominous caloric counts and wasted tax money, the Tea Party movement more effectively tackles the larger issue of increasing governmental power.

Because there is no single leading organizational force behind the Tea Party movement, smaller affiliations inspired by the same goal peacefully protest by hosting conventions that promote fiscal responsibility and free markets – results of a limited government – nationwide.

The Tea Partiers, encouraged by the First Amendment, peacefully demonstrate in order to ensure the enforcement of the Tenth Amendment, which grants any powers not specifically delegated to the United States by the Constitution “to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The Constitution said nothing about regulating my health, nor anyone else’s. So when a president informs healthy citizens they will be paying the medical costs of the guy who smokes two packs a day after promising to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States to the best of his ability, he can expect a bit of protest.

The Tea Party movement at its core is not strictly anti-Obama or pro- conservative. Only half of its constuitents are registered Republicans and the movement began stirring during the final days of the Bush administration in critique of the $700 billion bank bailout.

Although occasional racial slurs made at Tea Party conventions fuel acccusations that the entire Tea Party is racist and anti-Obama, those ignorant enough to claim President Obama was not born in Hawaii, nor that his grandfather served in General Patton’s army, cannot be considered representatives of the movement itself.

Another critique of the Tea Party movement is that it remains loosely organized. One cannot expect those who denounce authority to cooperate effectively under, well, authority. Nonetheless the British magazine “The Economist” described the Tea Party movement as “America’s most vibrant political force.”

Meanwhile President Obama said that the Tea Party rallies on April 15 across the United States “amused” him and suggested the participants “should be saying thank you.” Just a guess, but they might be more grateful if legislation was passed in accordance with the Constitution instead of on mere platform promises of change.