Soda Scuffle

James Lileks takes on the food Nazis and ridicules Michael Bloomberg's latest blinkered idiocy: he wants to ban Big Gulps. I'm starting to think Bloomberg is contractually obligated to come up with at least one Really Stupid Idea per week or risk being seen as potentially competent.

Let's get one thing clear: when the TV talk-show people lavish praise on the idea, it has nothing to do with some abstract notion of the costs of obesity. They just don’t like fat people. Fat people, at best, are a rebuke their own finicky vanity - I look good, why can’t you? - and at the worst, aesthetically unpleasant. If they all went away, the trim pert types woudl miss them after a while, and realize that people no longer came pre-packaged in a style that made them easy to dismiss.

A culture that redefines food choices as moral issues will demonize the people who don’t share the tastes of the priest class. A culture that elevates eating to some holistic act of ethical self-definition - localvore, low-carbon-impact food, fair trade, artisanal cheese - will find the casual carefree choices of the less-enlightened as an affront to their belief system. Leave it to Americans to invent a Puritan strain of Epicurianism.

So the law does nothing, except establish a wonderful visionary standard of desired behavior, and if it incidentally establishes a precedent that a voluntary transaction should be banned because the government doesn’t want you to consume 17 ounces but grudgingly admits you can have 16, that’s a minor pointt. Once conceded, surely it will never be exploited beyond its original definition.

As with everything else which leftists and other meddling social engineers conceive, it's the proverbial path to Hell paved with... well, I can't even say good intentions, because this is about control and narcissism. What's "good for people" is irrelevant, so long as the self-appointed elites get to tell everybody what to do, when to do it, and how it should be done. Never trust someone who tells you "it's for your own good" -- because they really mean just the opposite: it's good for them.