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Posted on 04/28/2010 11:37:49 AM PDT by rabscuttle385
Midway through D.C.'s February Snowpocalypse, with dystopian visions dancing in my head, I rented the 1982 sci-fi classic "Blade Runner." The movie's noir-ish picture of Los Angeles in 2019-dimly-lit and rainy, with flying cars, sexy replicants, and gruff, chain-smoking detectives-seems less prescient (and less foreboding) the closer we get to the year it depicts.
As the DVD played, one thought kept distracting me: "It's so cute that they used to think you'd be allowed to smoke in the future."
From a 2010 vantage point, the 21st century seems to promise an entirely different flavor of nightmare-one in which every individual consumption choice is subject to veto by the collective.
Consider the fact that President Obama's choice to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Thomas Frieden, doesn't seem to recognize any distinction between diseases you catch -- like swine flu -- and those that involve individual choice, like heart disease. When he served as Mayor Bloomberg's top health official, Frieden instituted mandatory calorie counts on restaurant menus, a trans-fat ban, and sent out swarms of officers to harass bar owners for the crime of having ashtrays.
"When anyone dies at an early age from a preventable cause in New York City, it's my fault," Frieden declared in 2006.
In September, Obama's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned clove cigarettes (because they taste good, so kids might like them). The agency's now considering banning menthols. Obamacare makes menu-labeling mandatory for chain restaurants.
And, last week the Washington Post reported that the FDA may "gradually over a period of years," lower the level of sodium allowed in American food, "to adjust the American palate to a less salty diet." Surely as a student of the U.S. Constitution, you're familiar with the clause where the Founding Fathers gave the federal government unlimited jurisdiction over "the American palate"?
Unfortunately, our newly passed health care plan lends weight to the argument that your health affects my pocketbook, and justifies me in telling you how to live. When "we're all in this together," woe betide the man who'd rather be left alone.
In the Eurosocialist paradise our betters have planned for us, we won't even get the good parts of continental life: quaint medieval towns with adorable restaurants serving rich cuisine. We'll get impersonal strip-mall feedbags full of low-sodium, vegan Soylent Green.
Oh, I know: I'm being ridiculous. When a columnist starts ranting about slippery slopes and sci-fi dystopias, it's well past time for last call.
But maybe you've noticed how quickly modern American reality outpaces satire-how often, in the increasingly popular blogpost title, "Life imitates 'The Onion.'"
A similar dynamic is at work when it comes to social engineers' plans to regulate bad behavior out of the human genome. In a 1997 Cato study criticizing trial lawyers' efforts to hold tobacco companies liable for the choices of individual smokers, my colleague Bob Levy closed by deploying the much-derided "slippery slope" argument.
"What's next?" he asked-raising the specter of an American nanny state devoted to protecting us from soft drinks, red meat, and fast foods. More than a decade later, Levy's nightmare looks pretty plausible.
In 1951's Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury pictured a future America run by book-burning censors, where a merry band of dissidents meets secretly to recite banned literature. Perhaps in America 2019, rebels will gather in the fields to smoke menthols and share black-market kosher dills.
If so, sign me up for the resistance, because the FDA can have my salty smoked almonds when they peel them from my cold, dead hands: "Wolverines!!"
Examiner columnist Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of "The Cult of the Presidency."
Ha! That’s easy. They’ll spot it on your monthly health inspection.
Seriously, though, forcing a monthly medical inspection on us as if we were livestock with about as much choice in the matter, that would be as good a cassus belli as any.
yeah, well....I’m not showing ANY insurance papers until the ILLEGALS have to show THEIR citizenship PAPERS....
No problem. That will take up so much room the title and picture will have to go on the back. And I'm sure there's no law controlling whether the boxes are stocked back out or front out.
If it's salt, it can't be "lower sodium". Salt is NaCl, Sodium Chloride. What they're selling must be a salt substitute or blend of salt and substitute.
Knowing the government, my guess would be add poison to it to render it inedible. Then when it dissolves in the rain or melted snow, it will soak into the ground (and groundwater) causing some new environmental disaster. (If you don't believe me see MTBE)
Yoda voice:
There will be. There will be.
Poison in your salt you will have.
I can see the FDA hiring people to spot check stores to make sure the nutrition labels face out.
If it’s not in the law, how can they? No law saying they can’t stock boxes in any orientation they like. OTOH, you’re probably right in the sense that it’s a pretty foreseeable scenario, and they often do anticipate those in new legislation.
OR...they’ll just mandate the information be on BOTH sides. Then we’re screwed and it’s impossible to make our own decisions about how to stock.
Well that is the claim on TV when they are selling a certain brand name of soup.
I didn’t have that branch of science in HS so I never learned about the element tables. Another failure of our school system. So it is my misunderstanding about sea salt being lower in sodium than regular salt and relying on a TV commercial.
The company that sells the sea salt with iodine in it is Hain. So far it is the only one I’ve seen on the grocery store shelf.
IF I go 2-3 weeks with out the salt with iodine I get real sick at my stomach, like morning sickness only lasting all day. I have a hypothyroid. I limit my salt intake, but what I do take in must have iodine in it.
Hey, if all the cops look like Sandra Bullock in those pants, it may be worth it.
Obviously oceans will have to be taxed.
Not necessarilyy... "Most medical advi(c)e now states that iodine in salt is no longer necessary due to our food sources arising from all over the world".
Also, just a technicality: ALL salt is SEA salt.
No doubt you are right. And just think of how many foundation grants and new envirowacko jobs and lawsuits will be created by the move!
I must not be eating the right foods then, because a lack of iodine makes me ill with in 3 weeks of going salt free.
It has been riciculous for a long time. It is now absurd.
I'm sure they have that in mind.
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