Bloomberg Takes Sweetness out of Life | The Atlas Society
Posted by Elliot 12 years, 2 months ago to Legislation
In all the brouhaha over the soda ban, let's not forget the essential principle: freedom for businesses to offer products to their customers without government intervention. Freedom to do what you want with your body without fear of being penalized for it by the feds.
As soon as you intrude onto the freedoms of others, your own freedoms cease to have legitimacy in the eyes of the Constitution. As soon as you become wealthy by taking advantage of others, you have ignored the goals of the founding fathers, in favor of being self-serving bastards..
As you are also aware, the founders soon realized that they had made a huge miscalculation in granting so much power to the states, and spent the rest of their lives back-tracking and fixing the myriad greed-associated problems that their earlier actions had unleashed. Limiting states rights isn't the result of those acting outside of respect for the Constitution, it is the result of those trying to make our union more perfect. The founders were the first to admit it, but you Randites pretend those writing and those legal rulings don't exist.
In a nutshell, the founders fully acknowledged that the individual does not exist outside of a society. Perhaps one or two people in the Alaskan outback, but for the most part we choose to be members of communities. That membership comes with a societal responsibility. It's not optional. You can't live amongst others and claim that your only responsibility is to yourself. Any even remotely accurate reading of the Constitution reveals that the founders weren't after every-man-for-himself isolationism, they were after balance and equity. Your problem is that you take it all too far. You view the founders attempts to enable the individual as permission for you to abuse other individuals.
Does it not strike you as odd that Randites have banded together in a group to make the point that groups have no place in their way of thinking?
Further, the Constitution makes no "grant" of power to the states. The only grant of power is to the federal government from the people, and the 9th Amendment makes perfectly clear that rights are retained by the people and are not granted by government, and the 10th Amendment makes clear that what authority that has not been granted the federal government is retained by the states or people respectively.
You certainly can live among others and accept responsibility for yourself and in a lawful and just society that is precisely what people do...live among each other and accept full responsibility for themselves. I do not "take it all too far" and it doesn't take a "Constitutional scholar" to see that the very express language of the Bill of Rights is not "enabling" the individual. That Bill of Rights is expressly prohibiting the federal government from trampling on the unalienable rights of the individual and makes perfectly clear that no rights have been "granted" but have simply been acknowledged in order to prohibit government from denying and/or disparaging those rights.
These so called "Randites" as you call them band together because alliances are more than necessary since the collectivists have banded together with the express purpose of trampling all over their rights, and claiming that a majority has the just authority to do so. They've banded together because they can spot nonsense millions of miles away and they can easily predict that this nonsense has the goal of enslaving them.
In much the same way that slave owners were themselves enslaved.
That doesn't mean people can't still kill themselves with soda just as they kill themselves with heroin, it mean they need to find a way to do it privately, where it doesn't become part of the public consciousness, and drag down others with it, especially impressionable children, at whom the bulk of the marketing is aimed.
Get a grip. lol.
So you are the soda police to keep kids from drinking to much huh?
Well lets look at what your way of thinking did to school district near me that decided to take the soda out of the vending machines because it was bad for the kids.
Kids in the district were late to class 174% more often, they were 33% higher in missing classes all together.
Next glorious idea was to increase the number of truancy officers.
No change.
A local businessman paid for a study to be done on the surrounding business (mostly convienestores and gas stations) and found that there soda sales were up about 20%, but there energy drinks (red bull and monsters) were up over 300% during school hours.
In addition the school district lost 137k in revenue.
next year the pop machines went back in, kids attendance increased and I would assume (no study was done) that the convenience stores had to make due with a decrease in sales.
Everything went back closer to how it should be and things were better.
There are examples of the same things in guns and every other market you want to look at. People will find a way to get what they want.
In this case its more likely that people will actually buy that 12 pack of soda and keep in there homes, increasing consumption beucase they use to just buy a 32 once drink at the convience store once a day on there way to work. Or like the guy that has the 12 once cup for his coffee and fills it every hour adding lots of sweet stuff and ends up drinking twice as much as the guy that gets the 24 ounce one once every morning....
The law is rediculous and will solve nothing. My bet is that in some way it will make things worse as nearly all government/force interventions of this type do.
The answer would be: None. The government has not stopped anyone from killing themselves with soda if that's what they are set on doing. The legislators did however decide they aren't going to do it on the public dime, something that should elate you anti-government freaks, since soda consumption has been shown to be the #1 dietary health risk to the general public today.
As for your little story, it's cute, but entirely anecdotal. It's like a driver running a red light and smashing your new car, and you blaming the light for being red. Your contention seems to be that allowing students to drink their choice of poison increases class attendance, makes them all smarter, solves world hunger, etc. If your contention was even the least bit true, we would make it mandatory that high schools stock vending machines with marijuana, and then the students would never leave.
A scientist you're not.
In terms of your "public dime" nonsense, the only possible way that sugary drink products could become a cost at the expense of the "public dime" is if the consequences of consumption of sugary drinks causes medical conditions that the "public" is forced to pay for. In other words, the Marxist social programs that use public money's to pay for health care. All you've managed to do is lend an example to the problem with socialized medicine, not justify rights disparagement validly.
This is why corporations can't dump their toxins in the middle of the nearest children's playground, and why drivers of cars can't force other motorists off the road. Get off you high horse, and stop pretending you should have unlimited rights to do whatever you want to do, even if the lawmakers have decided the public needs protecting, if only from their own poor decisions that ultimately impact all of us.
If you truly want the type of unlimited "freedom" you are arguing for, I hear Somalia is nice this time of year. If you want to stay in America however, we have rules.
As for your argument that there is not financial cost to people drinking sugary drinks, they represents the single greatest dietary threat to the US public today. That threat translates directly to increased insurance costs, which translates directly to increased costs to those of us practicing good health.
No, you don't have a right to do whatever you want, if your choices bring harm upon others. The Constitution couldn't be clearer on this issue.
We the People, regardless of what state we reside in, do not surrender our inherent political power simply because we elect public officials. The Preamble to the New York State Constitution makes perfectly clear who holds the inherent political power in that State and it is, as it is across the nation, the People.
You keep yammering on and on about corporations that "can't dump their toxins' and the new one for you is forcing other drivers off of the road. First, it should be noted that corporations regularly dump their toxins, and some do so with full approval of the EPA - so much for your precious regulatory bureaucracy - and as far as forcing other drivers off of the road, this would be a denial and/or disparagement of an unalienable right. No one has the right to trample over any other persons rights. That's what equality under the law means.
As for your continued strawman arguments, you have fully convinced me that this deceit is willful and insidious. I have not made any argument that there is no financial cost "to people drinking sugary drinks" and you know this. What I argued is that by you insisting this cost is on the "public dime" all you've done is indict social welfare programs funded by the public and not sugary drinks.
You desperately want to frame I and other in this site as arguing something we have not even come close to arguing. You seem to believe that any person reading this thread will some how be swayed by your pedestrian prose and ignore the arguments of better debaters. You are, of course, entitled to your fantasies, and even act upon those fantasies that cause no harm, but if you act upon your fantasies that do cause harm, this will not be tolerated by reasonable people who know the law, and as delusional as you appear to be, I certainly hope you are not so delusional to think that your pedestrian use of language will dazzle and mystify the reader or listener. Even the dimmest of wits are capable of recognizing horse manure.
So you're telling me that it's ok for the government to say how much of a product a company can sell and consumers can buy?
Also, if "public consciousness" is a standard, is hateful rhetoric ever a good thing, as any use of it tells everyone, especially the kids who witness it, that hate is a-ok?
Jefferson - Feared that the federal government had grown to powerful and as president considered taking out the US bank in favor of multiple state banks to check the federal power over currency.
Washington: When Hamilton wanted to assume state debts to the federal government as part of creating the US bank, Washington said no because it would pull to much power to the federal government and would not be fair to the states that had all ready paid their debts.
Madison: Once the constitution was ratified and the federal government formed he spend the rest of his political career on the side of Jefferson and the "republicans" of the time period. He fought against every expansion of federal government.
I could go on through many others. In fact Hamilton is the only founder that may support your interpretation of the constitution. However he has several things he did that would clearly show that assumption to be wrong, perhaps the biggest of which was after serving as secretary of treasury and secretary of state he left before Washington had finished his second term. Stating that the federal government now had all the framework necessary to perform the needed work. He said it a multiple page letter for his resignation, and as always took hours to say what most would say in minutes.
I think it safe to say that if Madison felt that creating a federal bank was more than the constitution chartered, and Hamilton reached a point where he felt the federal government had what it needed to perform its task that any government controlling the size of soda, or the amount of pollution a business generates would be well beyond what they had in mind for the role of government.
This is not a comprehensive post on history, but a few paragraphs.
You are like the people who attempt to dissuade the use of Reardon Steal in Atlas Shrugged. You write much but say nothing therefor there is nothing to refute but much innuendo.
The scale of government is from Anarchy to Tyranny. I do not care what form of tyranny you choose, that is the scale. Our founding fathers attempted to create a government that would keep us from falling into anarchy while keeping us as far from tyranny as possible. That is a fact, it is not disputed (well maybe by you, but not any thinking person).
To say or imply that we are as close to Anarchy as possible today without falling into it would require a person to have their head in the sand; which it appears that you might.
You attach Randians because of what you think. Feel free to practice your views in your own life and in your own business. I hope you ahve the ability to do so. I also would like to practice my own views in my own life and my own business. You seem to think that would be a crime. I would ask why but then I would have to respond to your ridiculous answer.
I wish you the results you work towards and me the results I work toward in my life. May you reap the rewards of your effort and be able to use them in a way you see fit, I only ask the same for me.
Neither can you.