I've really thought a lot about the Bloomberg Soda Ban and I simply can't imagine that I live in this America. I feel like I called this one back in the early 1990s and was told I was being alarmist. I mean, maybe I didn't say, "within 20 years a New York City mayor will propose a limit to how much of a certain food someone can sell to another person", but I can't remember actually leaping to a conclusion about how much of a fascist dictator our government really is that is somehow more horrendous than this proposal. Not because soft drink size is so important, but because of what it says about the intent of our government and the assumptive nature of their desire to control us.
Some day when you go to buy a dozen donuts you'll be asked to prove you have more people to eat them than just yourself.
This is the inevitable result of banning smoking in "private" places. I remember arguing against the smoking bans and Sally generally arguing against me based on it being a really big health problem, and "really big" was good enough.
Well now fatness is "really big" enough.
And this will never end.
3 comments:
I do think there is something different about the smoking bans. Secondhand smoke directly hurts the health of others around the smoker. Fat, not so much.
It's not even that they aren't different, but if you don't hold the line on vaguely, maybe, possibly harmful-to-others, then you invite the next step.
In fact, I would propose that no one ever *really* supported the smoking ban because it was potentially harmful to others, I think that was an excuse people told themselves to make themselves feel better for banning something that they didn't like about other people.
And if you do it to other people today, tomorrow it'll come back to you.
Fatness = big.
I see what you did there.
I think you are (shocker, I know) over-reacting to the "ban" because it's not a ban at all. It doesn't say you can't buy 32 oz of soda, just that the maximum size is limited to 16, so if you want 32 you have to deal with the pain in the ass factor of buying two. No threat to personal liberties here, folks.
This sort of regulation -- creating incentives or disincentives -- is in my opinion a far subtler and more effective way to change behavior than outright bans. If Boeing said "we're going to fire all our smokers" that would understandably provoke a huge backlash, because people react poorly to coercion. But they say "if you want to smoke you have to go outside in the rain and huddle against a wall to do it," well, that makes a PIA factor that has actually been pretty effective in reducing smoking rates.
I'm making an analogy about Boeing, a private company, but the same applies to government.
Now where you and I differ, I think, is that I think it's the role of government to improve the lives of the people, and part of that is public health, and part of that is regulating the products that are marketed to us and creating conditions where people are more likely to make healthy choices. They have to slaughter beef in sanitary conditions, raw milk is very hard to sell, Alar can't be on apples, and trans fats need to be removed. Portion size is not different as far as I am concerned.
I get that you're hugely into personal liberty. That's good. I'm glad that people like you are out there. But I see value in both liberty and happiness, a component of which is health. I don't think they're necessarily in tension here, but I do see that the government should pursue both.
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