– Mayor Bloomberg’s soda ban will cause New Yorkers to poison themselves with more aspartame (Natural News, Sep 14, 2012):
Ah, the hilarity of the nanny state knows no bounds, it seems. Especially not in New York City, where Mayor Bloomberg oversaw a large-sized soda ban that just became law. The really hilarious part of the law? It does not apply to aspartame-laced “diet sodas” which, by any honest measure, are far more toxic to your health than regular sodas made with HFCS.
HFCS may cause diabetes and obesity, but aspartame causes neurological damage and early-onset Alzheimer’s. But that’s just what New York needs, it seems: A wave of crabby soda-drinking senior citizens who are half blind and can’t remember where their apartment building is located. (Or has that already happened?)
That the New York city health board actually thinks diet soda is healthier than regular soda is a sad, sad commentary on the state of nutritional ignorance in NYC. So under this nanny state plan, citizens will be pushed to consume more neurotoxic aspartame — gee, what a brilliant plan! Why not ban vitamins, too, and just force everybody to take a daily chemotherapy pill and call it a “public health initiative?”
Soda prohibition will only create a new black market
I’m mesmerized by the arrogance of nanny state governments that think they can alter reality via decree. Bloomberg and the entire city health board somehow believes they will magically make people healthier by taking away their choice. So instead of actually educating New Yorkers about the dangers of HFCS and phosphoric acid — two of the primary health-destroying ingredients in sodas — they pull a nanny state / police state fast one and criminalize the selling of those sodas.
This, of course, will only create a black market in high-capacity sodas. So now, instead of people buying their sodas at legitimate establishments with relative compliance with public health regulations, they’re going to be buying “contraband” sodas in dark alleys where crime runs rampant. This is the upshot of all such prohibition laws by any government: economic transactions that used to be above the board are now driven underground. (Marijuana, see?)
Before long, tyrants like Bloomberg will dutifully announce “there is a crime wave of illicit soda sales taking place!” and therefore the city needs to create a soda prohibition task force to hunt down soda sellers and infiltrate their operations.
Yep, it’s time to declare the “War on Soda” … kind of like the War on Drugs, except even more of a waste of taxpayer money.
Then we’ll see the NYPD hiring “undercover soda buyers” to infiltrate soda selling establishments, posing as regular customers. They’ll ask for — OMG! — a “13 oz. soda” and see if the vendor actually serves it up. If they do, they’re arrested on the spot and processed as a soda criminal. Because, you know, they’re obviously a danger to society and need to be taken off the streets, right?
You see, the problem with creating new laws is that you then criminalize an entire segment of the population; then you need law enforcers to hunt those people down and “process” them with fines or criminal penalties. So instead of gaining public health, the city actually loses public freedom and creates a new crime enforcement overhead paid by taxpayers.
A nation with the most laws has the least freedom
The more laws you create in any jurisdiction, the less freedom you have remaining. Laws always have good intentions, of course, but they also have unintended consequences (such as driving people to drink more aspartame).
Such is the problem with trying to micromanage everybody from a centralized government: You can never successfully shape their behavior to your liking because people are individuals and they want to make up their own minds about things. Even if they do stupid things like drinking a Big Gulp soda sweetened with genetically modified corn syrup tainted with mercury. Yeah, it’s STUPID beyond belief, but it’s still their choice.
With this soda ban, Mayor Bloomberg is treating the citizens of New York like stupid little children. Or even like house pets. “Bad soda drinker! Bad!” It is a silly, dignity-crushing stance for any government to take, and it only breeds contempt among the People who increasingly see their local government “rulers” as power-hungry maniacs trying to micro-manage every little detail of their private lives.
What’s next? Is Bloomberg gonna pull a Singapore and ban chewing gum, too?
Or how about banning “dirty thoughts?” That could be a real windfall for the prison industry system.
Mark my words: In a year, New York’s obesity problem will be WORSE
The really hilarious realization in all this is that banning large sodas won’t make a bit of difference in the city’s obesity problem. A year from now — or five — you’re going to have even more cases of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
And why is that? Because most of these diseases are caused by nutrient deficiencies. Banning diet soda does nothing to get people more vitamin D, selenium, zinc or magnesium — the things that help prevent chronic degenerative disease. Diabetics, in particular, usually lack chromium, magnesium and vitamin D.
Banning people from buying large sodas does not magically make people take up exercise or consume fresh fruits and vegetables. You can’t legislate people to want to be healthy, especially when half the people writing and passing these laws are obese, cancer-ridden desk jockeys in desperate need of a colon cleanse.
Look, society is SICK. Disease is rampant. The food supply is toxic. People are eating themselves to death with GMO, HFCS, MSG, aspartame and more. But that’s mostly because huge food corporations dominate the legislation process and the poisons they put into the foods never get questioned.
Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t question aspartame, MSG or GMO. Neither did Michelle Obama with her newly-release grocery shopping guide. There’s never any real talk about the real poisons in your food. Instead, it’s just this watered-down nanny state mish-mash of pure political bunk.
I don’t drink soda, but that’s because I’m an intelligent person who doesn’t wish to poison my body with phosphoric acid and mercury-laced HFCS. I don’t need some silly government mandate to tell me that soda is poison. That should be obvious to anyone with half a brain.
I also don’t smoke marijuana, don’t eat bacon and don’t drink coffee. But again, that’s my choice. I don’t believe any one group of people has the right to tell another group of people what they can eat, drink or smoke. So why do we bow down, lick boots and surrender our freedoms over these things to the government?
Folks, if you live in NYC, you need to leave anyway. Not due to Bloomberg’s silly nanny state initiatives, but because the city will become a death zone in the coming economic collapse. NYC is the absolutely last place you want to be when it all comes down.
Maybe Bloomberg should just ban financial collapses, huh? That’s the ticket!