First they come for the alcohol, then for the tobacco, then for your sugar.
When the day arrives when you have to undergo a background check and endure a three-day waiting period to enter a Dunkin’ Donuts, you can trace the loss of your unrestricted access to a Boston Kreme or French Cruller to this moment. Namely the publication in the journal Nature of an article calling for regulating sugar as a health hazard, although stopping “far short of all-out prohibition” (that would be too extreme).
Apparently nothing is too extreme for these busybodies.
Lowry goes on to note:
Under this regime, we’ll go from gun-free school zones to Snickers-free school zones. Lustig and Co. want to double the price of a soda by taxation. They seriously propose starting to card young people who try to buy a Dr. Pepper, with an age cutoff of 17. This will make 17 a fraught age: Old enough (with parental consent) to join the military and old enough to buy chocolate milk....
The mindset of the Robert Lustigs of the world is that we can’t trust parents or individuals to make sound choices. ....
If this all seems good for yuks, just wait ten years.
Let me just state that if Barack and Michelle occupy the White House for another term, then we can anticipate an even shorter wait time for our sugar-free utopia.
The entire Democratic Party (along with significant numbers in the Republican Party, unfortunately) have morphed into annoyingly intrusive, know-it-all nannies, whose goal is not to persuade you that their ideas are correct or even better than yours; but to force you to accept their ideas by making them laws.
We used to contemptuously call such people busybodies (which was not a compliment), and, by and large, were mostly able to ignore their nitpicking power plays to control or change our lives.
Sadly, we can't do that anymore.
When they start controlling everything from mandating health care coverage to the type of light bulb you use in your lamps' to the amount of sugar and other items you consume, a free society just becomes another oppressive postmodern deceit.
But we the people have let all these postmodern busybodies of all political persuasions think they can get away with running out lives, especially when they precede their power grab with the sickeningly sweet bromides like, "BUT, IT'S FOR THE CHILDREN!!"
Here is Mathhew Yglesias, who thinks that the "trouble" with America is that we don't give our children good enough school lunches. We give them Pizza—the horror of it all!:
I was being a bit contrarian about an aspect of this on Twitter the other day, but obviously it’s insane to declare that your average slice of public school pizza meets healthy eating standards for high nutrition. Everyone understands that. Sometimes public policy goes awry because of good faith disagreement about the issues, but there’s no serious disagreement about whether “feed kids more pizza” is a valid way to improve the nutritional content of school lunch. Read Michele Simon on the gory details of the ferocious lobbying that led to this outcome. Compare that to the story of Finland’s 1999 school lunch reform, which basically took the form of well-qualified people giving parliament a few options reasonable options and then parliament picking one whose budgetary costs they were comfortable with.
This contrast tells us a lot about America. It has a lot of lessons to teach. Most notably, it reminds us that provision of public services in this country tends not to work very well and also that low-quality provision is not inevitable. But all too often in the United States we have programs that are too dominated by the interests of the service providers. And all too often in the United States we have partisans responding to these controversies thanks to arbitrary facts about the organizational structure of the service providers. So we’ll argue about “unions” or “agribusiness” or “for-profit colleges” without seeing the underlying common structure of the problem.
A government that works well is a really valuable thing to have. It can give you reasonable nourished, healthy kids who learn a lot in school. It can give you safe streets and reasonable commuting times. It can prevent banking panics. There’s more to life than that stuff, but it’s not nothing. But you have to fight to make it work
Got that? The trouble with America is that the government can give us "reasonable noursished healthy kids who learn a lot in school" but the evil private sector is only interested in profits.
Yglesias is a true believer in the soft, compassionate tyranny of the mommy state. His touching confidence that the government will keep us all healthy and safe from the evils of the world (or, at least the evil of pizza for lunch) is amusing, albeit misplaced.
This kind of busybody dogoodism is even less amusing when it emanates from the sugar daddies who are currently running our government.
Most congresspersons, be they Democrat or Republican, have never met a government program they didn't like, as long as it helps them get elected or re-elected. “Promise the Suckers Anything!” (Suckers=Us). And, of course, human nature being what it is, most people are enthusiastically willing to take something when it is promised to us for nothing.
But, their ready and contradictory promises aren’t without consequences. And, they cost somewhat more than nothing.
There are two problems here. The first is how we the people casually shrug off any personal responsibility and abdicate our self-reliance and freedoms. If we do it often enough; eventually we will develop an enlarged sense of entitlement to other people's money and effort.
Next, we will be caught up in aggrieved victimhood, when the gravy train stops. If you doubt this, then take note of the riots in Greece and Italy and Portugal over the fact that even though their countries are completely broke and bankruptcy is upon them; they refuse to acknowledge reality, demanding like children that everything go on as usual and that they continue to receive what was "promised" to them by their own self-absorbed and anti-reality politicians.
Pretending that the real world doesn't exist is something to be expected from infants and children; in adults it is malignantly narcissistic.
The list of what these sugar daddies and mommy statists are willing to control in YOUR life to increase THEIR power, goes to infinity and beyond. Believe me, there is no end to what these Postmodern busybodies will try to control about your life and your choices in order to make themselves feel good.
Ironically, these are the same people who are presumably "pro-choice" and champion "abortion rights" and a Woman's right to choose, arguing that, since it is her body, she gets to kill the fetus if she doesn't want it. But never mind all that choice business when it comes to putting demon sugar in that body.
These crusaders for peace and social justice and bans on everything are everywhere, but they are scariest when we ourselves give them the power to make us into children and act out their malignant parental fantasies.
Take Nancy Pelosi, the poster child for the mommy state; who loudly proclaims her every action to be "for the children!" Her most recent gambit is to “do for childcare what we did for healthcare.”
No child care provider left behind.
In a rational and yes, a "just" society, these busybodies would be laughed at. In a society that valued self reliance and personal responsibility, they would rightly be considered complete and total idiots.
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