Nanny Bloomberg on the Government's Highest Duty
Mayor Bloomberg has apparently backed down from a confrontation with the OWS mob. But he's not backing down in the battle against salt! From Jacob Sullum at Reason, more evidence of Hizzoner's bizarre sense of priorities:
At a recent U.N. conference on "the prevention and control of non-communicable diseases," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg bragged about his efforts to discourage consumption of salt and trans fats while explaining why only the government can be trusted to decide what people should eat:
"There are powers only governments can exercise, policies only governments can mandate and enforce and results only governments can achieve. To halt the worldwide epidemic of non-communicable diseases, governments at all levels must make healthy solutions the default social option. That is ultimately government's highest duty."
There you have it: On Bloomberg's to-do list for government, defending us against our own unhealthy habits ranks above defending us against foreign invaders or marauding criminals.
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Re: Nanny Bloomberg on the Government's Highest Duty
I was in Ethiopia last week. Plenty of government in evidence but precious little health.
Oct '10
Re: Nanny Bloomberg on the Government's Highest Duty
That's horrible. He can make the case that local governments can do this sort of thing, but saying that government (which in America is always a shorthand for "the federal, central government that governs 300 million people with hundreds of ethnic and demographic subgroups") can do so is obscene.
Dec '10
Re: Nanny Bloomberg on the Government's Highest Duty
Bloomberg apparently can be persuaded to turn a blind eye to an unsanitary situation that will breed communicable diseases, if the political optics of public health are wrong.
Dec '10
Re: Nanny Bloomberg on the Government's Highest Duty
Bloomberg makes me sick. What should the government do about that?
Jul '10
Re: Nanny Bloomberg on the Government's Highest Duty
Government's highest duty is to protect me from me?
Michelle Obama wouldn't say something that silly.
Try again, Mike.
Nov '10
Re: Nanny Bloomberg on the Government's Highest Duty
Re: Nanny Bloomberg on the Government's Highest Duty
Sadly, I think he's talking about government at every level. I think Bloomberg suffers from the fallacy that because he ran a successful business as a control freak, government also ought to be run by control freaks.
Jun '10
Re: Nanny Bloomberg on the Government's Highest Duty
So when the Constitution mentions the "common defense" it's referring to defending ourselves from the common salt shaker?
Feb '11
Re: Nanny Bloomberg on the Government's Highest Duty
Bloomberg is a bright shining example of the catastrophic failure of American governance.
A while back Ricochet had a thread on American exceptionalism. I didn't have time to comment, alas. But I recall thinking that the real source of American exceptionalism was that there was no ruling class to impose idiotic whims and failures upon the public, because the United states was a free country.
Well. Here we are today with the mayor of the largest city in the country discussing his efforts to choose his subjects diet.
Something is very wrong with this, and at a deep and fundamental level. It isn't just about salt. Once it took a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol sales. Now any petty bureaucrat can ban this-or-that, and there is no appeal, no matter what the consequences.
And we'll be told it's all for our own good. If you happen to be Nanny Bloomberg I'm sure that seems only well and good.
If you're anyone else- not so much. Consent of the governed is an important factor in governmental legitimacy, but the US government seems to consider it irrelevant.
Yeah, that's a problem.
May '10
Re: Nanny Bloomberg on the Government's Highest Duty
By what mechanism does a non-communicable disease grow into a world-wide epidemic? And how can government interrupt that mechanism?
Dec '10
Re: Nanny Bloomberg on the Government's Highest Duty
Amazing, a set back for Emperor of the RINOs. He's the only Republican who can attack the Obama administration from the left. I think he can do this because of a birth defect. He was born without a heart or a spine.