Eating the State

Daniel Greenberg on the great Nanny State:

In Gotham, Michael the First, King of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx and the rebellious province of Staten Island, has returned from celebrating his successful campaign against large sodas, to consider expanding the ban to large popcorn and milkshakes. Los Angeles has voted to ban the plastic bag and add a 10 cent fine for paper bags.


Where does the future of the Nanny State lead? In Sweden, the Left Party is calling for men to be banned from urinating standing up. And why not? If the government should have a say in what food you eat and what you carry the groceries you buy in, why not have it complete the cycle and tell you how to eliminate them?

We have laws that strictly control every aspect of the production, packaging, distribution and sale of food. From there we moved on to laws controlling the consumption and consumer transportation of it. Once every step in the process from planting the seed in the earth to actually putting it in your mouth has been legislated and regulated; all that's left is a government mandated bathroom experience.

Liberals like to claim that they don't believe the government should be in your bedroom. Apparently, they believe that it should be in your bathroom instead. Not to mention in your kitchen and digging through your trash like raccoons on steroids.

The Left Party's rationale for playing bathroom police, is the same one put forward by Bloomberg's soda police and the same one that was used to take complete control of food production. Health.

"Party speakers cited medical research they said shows men empty their bladders more efficiently while seated. Improved bladder evacuation reduces the risk for prostate problems, according to the party."

Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the formerly free world is being treated to Party lectures on the proper way to use the bathroom. There may even be a little red book with the words of some Socialist leader to inspire us to properly go about our day in harmony with the will of the Party, whose enlightened wisdom informs every moment of our lives.

It's a short hop and skip from the government deciding to fight heart attacks by banning sodas to fighting prostate cancer by banning urination. When government controls health care, it also has complete authority over every aspect of your life. The old public health crises were infectious diseases. The new public health crisis is absolutely everything. And the authorities are in crisis mode all the time fighting wars on a hundred fronts against the habits of the human race.

Want to ban people from swallowing without chewing their food? Invite in a panel of experts to put on a spreadsheet show proving that swallowing without chewing kills 400 people a year and costs the government three billion dollars in health care expenses. And before you know it, that three billion will be used to dispatch food monitors to every public eatery and private kitchen.

During the ObamaCare debate, Keith Olbermann aired one of his more ridiculous broadcasts with the title,. "Health Care Reform: The Fight Against Death". But everyone dies. Not everyone lives. And some live lives of quiet desperation, waiting for the police to arrive and arrest them for their large soda, carried in a plastic bag and then improperly eliminated.

During the American Revolution, it was, "Give me Liberty or give me death." Today it's, "Give me Universal Health Care or give me death." And the alternative to death is a nanny state that controls every aspect of our lives, only for us to die anyway. Fighting for Liberty may occasionally make men immortal, but fighting for government bureaucracy just makes them slaves. 

If health is dependent on government health care, and government health care is dependent on everyone being so healthy that they don't need government health care, an irresolvable failure loop develops in which money is being spent on preventative social engineering to avoid spending money on health care, which has to be spent anyway. 

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