San Francisco is considering a ban on the sale of goldfish. Basically, the government is afraid that people are getting fish as impulse buys and not treating them properly, so they don’t want to allow anyone to buy them at all. They’re also considering a ban on parents having their babies circumcised.
They’ve already banned Happy Meals, as they think they’re too enticing to children and parents can’t be expected to control what their own kids eat. Also increasingly regulating the daily behavior of its citizens is New York City under Mayor Bloomberg, who has banned trans-fats city-wide and smoking in most of the city and has considered a ban on salt.
The leaders of these cities have taken it upon themselves to place their own opinions of what people should or should not be doing above basic liberty. They’ve made it the government’s role to be a nanny and have ruled individual choice as unimportant. And I have one thing to say to them: Finally, someone is remembering the principles this country was founded on.
Back before the Unites States was an independent nation, people lived in horrific conditions under British rule. The British weren’t providing very good free health care (wait time for a poor person to get an MRI was over 200 years), they were refusing to increase taxes on the rich, and they had very few laws dictating what colonists were allowed to eat, causing many to become obese on the high-fructose maize syrup the Indians taught them to make.
So the colonists kept demanding that the British give them big government to regulate their lives and provide for their basic needs while confiscating all their wealth. “We’re stupid,” they’d cry out to the British. “Please rule us and make us do what you think is best!” But the British kept refusing, saying, “No, you guys are doing okay by yourselves. We want you to have the freedom to run your own lives.”
It was this laissez-faire attitude that led to the Boston Massacre, in which five people died of heart attacks in Boston from eating fatty foods a proper government would never have let them eat in the first place. Finally the colonists had enough of not being bossed around and decided if the British weren’t going to provide them the all-encompassing government they wanted, they had to make it themselves.
They started by throwing tea into the Boston Harbor since they determined it had too much caffeine and people shouldn’t have been allowed to drink it. Then they formed militias to collect more taxes from the colonists to spend on welfare and government works projects. The British tried to strike back by ending regulations and giving tax rebates, but the colonists were now ready to fight to make sure some large entity would tell them what to do. And many were rallied to the cause by Patrick Henry’s cry of “Give me a large government telling me what I can and can’t do while spending most of my money, or give me death!”
Soon, Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, which includes the famous line, “We hold these truths to be revealed after careful study by Ivy League-educated people, that all men are in need of constant care and supervision, that they are endowed by the highly-educated intellectual class with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are free Health Care, strict and expansive Regulations on all activities, and the pursuit of Big Government.”
For these causes the Revolutionary War was fought and won, allowing the colonists to form their own country: the United States of America. And they made a constitution giving the government the right to control its citizens’ activities and wealth and made sure the Constitution had lots of things like the Commerce Clause, which could be broadly interpreted to allow people in the government to do whatever they felt was best, such as force people to buy things. And they added a Bill of Rights, which outlined all the free stuff the federal government was supposed to give everyone in case they were too lazy or stupid to get it themselves.
So America prospered until there formed a group of agitators who wanted to put as much salt as they wanted on their food. This could not be allowed, of course, so America fought the extremely bloody Civil War, which led to two horrible outcomes: The first ever Republican president (who was killed while in office by going to the theater and eating popcorn made with refined coconut oil) and the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended one of the greatest progressive programs ever, one that had guaranteed jobs and shelter to millions of underprivileged people.
America continued on, though, with Reconstruction: The attempt to build government as big as it had been before the war. And the government got bigger and stronger for many years until one day America faced its greatest nemesis yet: the Nazis. The Nazis (a.k.a. the National Capitalist German Investors’ Party) started spreading all over Europe, radically reducing government and ending all regulations on business and individual behavior (you can watch old footage of them savagely cutting taxes if your stomach can handle it). As a result, millions died from obesity and smoking. Luckily the world united against them and defeated that evil, and everyone vowed that people would never again live without a government dictating their every action.
So it seemed things would be peaceful for a time, but then arose the Red Menace — also known as Red Staters — who demanded this dangerous thing called liberty where people got to make their own choices even if really smart people — people with PhDs from prestigious schools — thought it was a bad idea. As obviously stupid as this liberty idea was, it caught on and has infected the American psyche ever since. And now people have forgotten the very American ideals of regulation and government control this nation was founded on.
But San Francisco and New York City are bravely taking a stand for the true American idea of a government that controls our every action. They know that “freedom” should instead be called “costly dumb” because it is stupidity that costs us all and leads to obesity, lung cancer, over-salting, and circumcised children getting toys in their meals. People think liberty is a great thing to have, but is it worth having people impulsively buy goldfish and then later realize that maybe they didn’t want the goldfish but now they’re stuck with the goldfish? Of course not; nothing is worth that. And it’s un-American to insinuate otherwise.
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