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Welcome to the Unanny States of America. Now that you're here, there are a few things you need to know. The first is that you don't know what is best for you, and therefore, you need the State to look out for your well-being.
This is apparently the direction our country is heading now, and the recent news out of New York City that, due to the "obesity epidemic," the Mayor is considering a ban on the sale of sodas over 16 oz. in restaurants. His logic is that over 50% of New Yorkers are obese, and sugary soft drinks are one of the major causes of this problem.
Oddly enough, there doesn't appear to be any real studies or documentation to this, or to what criteria they are using to declare half their population as obese. What we have is a declaration of a "problem," a conjecture stated as irrefutable fact for a major cause of this problem, and a dubious-at-best solution to this problem.
It becomes even stranger when this "solution" is examined in the light of what the law would not cover. You could not buy a 32 oz. drink with your Subway sandwich lunch, but you could walk next door to the Quickie-Mart and buy the Bladder Buster drink there instead. You could not buy a 32 oz. soda at the burger joint, but you could buy a 24 oz. milkshake. The copious amounts of sugar in the soda are an evil making people fat, but copious amounts of sugar in "fruit juice" based drinks are okay. For that matter, you couldn't buy a 32 oz Coke at a restaurant, but under the provisions of the proposed law, you could buy a 32 oz. Rum and Coke at a bar. If you need a boost after your drinking binge, you could also buy a huge sugary coffee based beverage from Starbucks before catching a cab home. It's just the restaurant soda that is making a majority of New Yorkers obese, apparently.
At the same time, the medical and health-industry people that decide what constitutes "obese" are continually lowering the threshold for being overweight. If you're on the heavy side, and have been working hard to lose weight, it could be a bit frustrating to almost achieve that target weight, only to find out the next time you visit your doctor that you'll still be "obese" by the new standards once you reach that weight. By the medical charts, most bodybuilders are "obese," because they are heavier than the charts say they should be for their height. They probably got that way drinking sodas from McDonald's, too.
You might think I'm getting a bit too excited about something as trivial as the size of a soda cup. The problem isn't the size of a soda cup, and really, it won't solve anything. Rather than drinking a 32 oz soda, they'll get a refill on their 16 oz. soda and drink the same amount anyway. The real problem here is not whether people are overweight, or whether they are consuming things that are less than ideally healthy. The real problem here is that we have created the Nanny Culture, wherein we have established the precedent that we are entitled to impose our perception of what is "good for you" on other people. This goes back a few years, and was started by laws and taxes on less popular vices. Once upon a time in this country, it wasn't even illegal to indulge in various narcotics. Someone decided those were bad, and laws were passed to prohibit them. The result is our long-running, wasteful "war on drugs" that sought to prevent the hazards of recreational drug use, and only added illegal drug-use crimes to the mix. People still use the drugs, only now, we have a lucrative market for illegal drugs that fuels a massive criminal culture.
Few people would deny that smoking is detrimental to your health, but rather than illegalize smoking (the tobacco lobby is quite wealthy and powerful), we've instead sought to motivate people to healthier habits by taxing tobacco excessively and making it more inconvenient to smoke. These laws were easy to pass, because the majority of the population these days does not smoke, so the taxes do not affect them, right?
Wrong. The very logic used against tobacco, is being used to propose laws and taxes against other things people consider unhealthy. You may think that's fine, so long as the vices under attack are ones you do not indulge in, but just wait - they'll get around to you eventually. By then, you'll have no defense, because you happily voted to tax everyone else's vice.
When the movie "Demolition Man" came out, it portrayed a future society where unhealthy things were illegal. You couldn't smoke. You couldn't drink. You couldn't eat red meat. You couldn't swear. You couldn't read or view anything considered "unacceptable." Even sex was made "safe" by an electronic simulation instead of actually relating to another human being. The movie was a bit over-the-top, partly for humor's sake, but it's not so outrageous any longer. We are steadily moving towards a society where personal choice and personal responsibility are abdicated in favor of a Government that oversees every aspect of our lives - supposedly for our own good.
If you don't think this sounds so bad, then please consider this - who will decide what is healthy and acceptable behavior? Would you think it such a great idea, if someone like Fred Phelps worked their way into the position of overseer of our health?
It would not be the first time in history a hatemonger managed to ascend to a position of extreme power, and we'll have no one to blame but ourselves.
We might even have a little time to console each other in the correction institutions we'll be sent to.
For our own good, of course. The Nanny State cares about what is best for us, you see.
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