NYC's Bloomberg Coming After Your Soda!

Cross-posted at the the Left Coast Rebel

Freedom-obstructing road block ahead - beware the totalitarian nanny state!

Writes the New York Times (emphasis mine):

New York City plans to enact a far-reaching ban on the sale of large sodas and other sugary drinks at restaurants, movie theaters and street carts, in the most ambitious effort yet by the Bloomberg administration to combat rising obesity. The proposed ban would affect virtually the entire menu of popular sugary drinks found in delis, fast-food franchises and even sports arenas, from energy drinks to pre-sweetened iced teas. The sale of any cup or bottle of sweetened drink larger than 16 fluid ounces — about the size of a medium coffee, and smaller than a common soda bottle — would be prohibited under the first-in-the-nation plan, which could take effect as soon as next March.

I could go after every false assertion and misguided idiocy in this article (such as this being Bloomberg's effort to "combat obesity" or that even a ball-game soda will be illegal but beer won't!).

But I won't.

I'll just use this story as today's teachable moment in American Statism Gone Wild.

I'll start things with an honest statement: I don't drink sodas, sugary drinks, soft drinks, colas, root beer; in fact, save for a few spoonfuls in my morning coffee, I completely avoid sugar in toto as well.

I know, I know; I understand -- anything that deteriorates a penny in 24 hours can't be good for you. Soda rots your teeth, sugar in extreme amounts exacerbates diabetes and poor health.

But so what?

I will defend to my dying breath the freedom of my fellow American to drink as much soda as they wish. And shouldn't every American do the same?

When in the world did America go from our collective understanding and appreciation of, "that which doesn't interfere with my liberty or rights is none of my business," to, "hey look over there, a fat kid; it's time to ban soda!"

(Onion Image) If NYC's Mayor Bloomberg has his way, this guy could go to jail

Instead of becoming a freer society, America is heading in the precise opposite direction.

Instead of becoming more tolerant (real tolerance, not the mind-prison politically-correct kind), we are becoming more ready, able and willing to criminalize behavior that we don't like, or things, substances, behaviors et. al. that we think are damaging to our fellow citizens.

Instead of making societal judgement calls using individual liberty as our only guiding light, we castigate and legislate against those different than us. This has to stop. We have to regain the spirit of individual freedom and the freedom to fail or succeed that made America so great.


Nevertheless, if there is a silver lining to this story it is political for it demonstrates in Big Gulp-Red flying colors just what the progressive agenda is truly about.

In the 1920s, progressives gave us Prohibition and the mayhem that thus ensued. Among many other things, progressives then gave us the gift of failure that is the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty (both of which have done nothing to "solve" the problems they supposedly address, rather they have put into place multi-trillion dollar Industrial Complexes (untold incarceration costs, lost liberties and untold billions/trillions for the former and in excess of $9 trillion for the latter) that actually perpetuate a targeted issue. Dozens of additional government schemes fall into this category.

True conservatives abhor limiting individuals. It is the progressive left (and progressive Republican types) that wish to do so. In their sense of nannyism and elitism and I-know-better-than-you-ism they will stop short of nothing in taking away our once-cherished freedoms.

 Until we say enough is enough.

George Will on Creative Destruction

Wikipedia

Cross-posted at the Left Coast Rebel

From Will's excellent Washington Post column today on creative destruction:

Creative destruction continues in the digital age. After 244 years — it began publication five years before the 1773 Boston Tea Party — the Encyclopaedia Britannica will henceforth be available only in digital form as it tries to catch up to reference Web sites such as Google and Wikipedia. Another digital casualty forgot it was selling the preservation of memories, a.k.a. “Kodak moments,” not film.

America now is divided between those who find this social churning unnerving and those who find it exhilarating. What Virginia Postrel postulated in 1998 in “The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress” — the best book for rescuing the country from a ruinous itch for tidiness — is even more true now. Today’s primary political and cultural conflict is, Postrel says, between people, mislabeled “progressives,” who crave social stasis, and those, paradoxically called conservatives, who welcome the perpetual churning of society by dynamism. tasists see Borders succumb to e-books (and Amazon) and lament the passing of familiar things. Dynamists say: Relax, reading is thriving. In 2001, the iPod appeared, and soon stores such as Tower Records disappeared. Who misses them?

Theodore Roosevelt, America’s first progressive president, thought it was government’s duty to “look ahead and plan out the right kind of civilization.” TR looked ahead and saw a “timber famine” caused by railroads’ ravenous appetites for crossties that rotted. He did not foresee creosote, which preserves crossties. Imagine all the things government planners cannot anticipate when, in their defining hubris, they try to impose their static dream of the “right kind” of future.

Read The Rest.

Will is correct in that progressive tend to reject -- and even viscerally hate and/or loathe -- the dynamism of so-called creative destruction. But unfortunately that doesn't necessarily mean conservatives understand the true brilliance of laissez faire capitalism; they are just less hostile to its tenets...

But just what is creative destruction, you ask?

Investopedia:

Creative destruction occurs when something new kills something older. A great example of this is personal computers. The industry, led by Microsoft and Intel, destroyed many mainframe computer companies, but in doing so, entrepreneurs created one of the most important inventions of this century.

Schumpeter goes so far as to say that the "process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism."

Why is it unknown?

A-ha! That's why progressives hate the concept of creative destruction: for the dynamism of free markets (and the symbiosis of rationally self-interested individuals that fuel the brilliance of free markets to work,) something "newer" needs to "kill" something "older."

Like any other area where individual folks are left alone to pursue happiness, it is chaotic and in many cases not "fair" because someone eventually ends up with "more" than someone else!

This quote from Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, strikes a note on the creative destruction topic (hat-tip Adam Smith Institute):

A Bronze Age empire stagnated for much the same reason that a nationalized industry stagnates: monopoly rewards caution and discourages experiment, the income is gradually captured by the interests of the producers at the expense of the interests of the consumers, and so on. The list of innovations achieved by the pharaohs is as thin as the list of innovations achieved by British Rail or the US Postal Service.

FURTHER READING: At the Ayn Rand Institute, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal":

Readers of Atlas Shrugged are struck by the moral fire of Ayn Rand’s defense of business and capitalism. She does not regard capitalism as an amoral or immoral means to some “common good”—as do most of its defenders—but as a profoundly moral social system. It is, she wrote, “the only system geared to the life of a rational being.”

In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, which Ayn Rand called “a nonfiction footnote to Atlas Shrugged,” she and others explain the social system that she held has “never been properly understood and defended—and whose very existence has been denied.” That system is laissez-faire capitalism: a social system in which the government is exclusively devoted to the protection of individual rights, including property rights, and therefore in which there exists absolutely no government intervention in the economy.

Capitalism is not a treatise on the economics of capitalism, but a collection of essays on the philosophy of capitalism: the basic truths and principles that make capitalism the only moral and practical social system—the only system consistent with man’s nature and the requirements of his life—the only one that enables each individual to reach his full, glorious potential.