Food Nazi Alert: Nanny Bloomberg Bans Large Drinks
June 1, 2012 12 Comments
New York City Mayor Michael “Nanny” Bloomberg wants to ban large drinks. Apparently Bloomberg is convinced that large coffee’s and large pop’s are making Americans obese. This “problem” is something Bloomberg thinks government must take on. A century ago progressives like this were trying to ban alcohol, now they’re trying to ban drinks with sugar in them. He isn’t concerned about milkshakes with all their fat and sugar. He isn’t concerned about large 32oz beer’s with all their calories served at Yankee Stadium and bars throughout the city. Nor is he concerned with doughnuts and all their fat and sugar. In fact, the Mayor endorsed National Doughnut Day with a video!
It’s only sugar drinks over 16oz that Bloomberg wants a piece of. He believes it’s his duty to “force you to understand.” He isn’t banning us from doing things, he’s simply forcing us to understand. How Orwellian. Adults can and should be free to make their own drink size choices. It really shouldn’t be any of the government’s business one way or the other. Bloomberg’s plan fails in that there’s nothing stopping me from buying two or more 16oz drinks. It also fails to combat obesity by failing to ban milkshakes, doughnuts and doritos. The problem though is that it’s a step in that direction. The progressives learned from prohibition. Going at it all at once is a bad idea, taking it step by step works. Food totalitarianism here we come!
One of the problems with government control of healthcare is that it leads to a reasonable argument for government micromanaging our lives. If it saves the state money to micromanage us by banning drinks, it becomes a taxpayer savings argument that may even draw in conservatives. A quarter of Americans are on Medicaid these days, almost as many are on Medicare. In New York it may be even higher. Suddenly obesity, which should be little more than a private issue, becomes a “public health” issue.
This is where Obamacare becomes so problematic because it will lead to socialist single payer healthcare. Rather than having fat people pay higher rates for their health insurance, taxpayers are going to be stuck paying for fat people’s healthcare. That gives incentive to people like Bloomberg, who want to micromanage our lives, to propose laws that actually do so. Step by step of course. One morning we’ll wake up to discover that we aren’t allowed to drink pop, we aren’t allowed to have an egg cream and National Doughnut Day will have long since been banned.
Bloomberg is trying to force us all to understand. What he doesn’t understand though is that we adults already know that sugary drinks can make us fat. We simply don’t care. We make choices, we’re adults who understand that the momentary pleasure of drinking a pop could lead to the undesirable consequence of obesity. We’ve made a rational choice not to care about the latter. We of course won’t even get into the absurd statistics which have been manipulated to show that nearly all of us are obese when in fact most of us are simply a few pounds overweight.
Bloomberg needs to understand what freedom is. It is not his job as Mayor to micromanage the lives of the people of New York just like it’s not the job of the President t micromanage the lives of Americans. Bloomberg is proposing food totalitarianism. If successful you can bet it will be coming to a city near you soon. Mayor’s across the country have power envy, once one mayor achieves an amount of power over the people in his city every other mayor wants the same power. New York first, San Francisco next, then Chicago then your small city. Meanwhile freedom falls by the wayside.
