The Los Angeles City Council has issued a moratorium banning new fast food restaurants in South Central Los Angeles for a year. This ban covers a 32-square-mile area with 500,000 low-income, racially-mixed minority group residents. According to the food fascists of the L.A. City Council, South Central L.A. has too many greasy fast food joints and not enough white-table-cloth healthy restaurants and locally grown organic grocers.
The L.A. City Council believes the adults of South Central can not make healthy food choices. Next, it will require all L.A. fast food places to show calories next to their menu items. Finally, the council is considering a ban on all outdoor smoking. The L.A. City Council has appointed itself to the questionable position of societal nanny. However, Angelinos aren’t the only people facing a nanny. All Californians face nanny-state laws imposing safety, health, and morality.
Don’t drink then drive. So far, there are no laws against driving while hung over. Wear a condom — don’t have unprotected sex. Don’t have sex with a sex worker, protected or not. Even better, don’t multitask by having unprotected sex while you’re driving, drinking an alcoholic beverage, and smoking pot. And don’t smoke pot unless you have a doctor’s prescription. Don’t do drugs, but it’s OK to drink a glass of wine a day.
Lysander Spooner, a 19th century libertarian, said this about what was happening in his era: “It is the assumption by one man, or body of men, of a right to abolish outright all the natural rights, all the natural liberty of all other men; to make all other men their slaves; to arbitrarily dictate to all other men what they may, and may not, do; what they may, and may not, have; what they may, and may not, be.”
Those trenchant words from 150 years ago speak to our current abysmal state of affairs. We have become a nation of sheep-le, peacefully grazing while allowing the nanny-state to gradually tyrannize us through its dictates, one by one by one.
We are given stern warnings about what we should not eat or drink. Edicts delineate children’s education as to what must be learned and what the test scores should be to prove they learned it. Decrees require us to buy state permits and licenses to fix our own homes, to open a business, to get married, or to become a beautician.
Government law requires forced “voluntary” taxation of our hard-earned incomes to fund redistribution to “those in need.” Unfortunately, the people in need are politically selected by those doing the “Robbing Hood” plunder and redistribution, not the income earner whose wages are taken for this involuntary philanthropy.
A Latin phrase describes these intolerable situations: Non nobis, sed aliis, or, “Not for us, but for others.” Which means, it’s for your own good, and the legislators know what’s best for your own good. They’re the ruling elite, and rulers must be obeyed or else.
Our personal decisions should not be forced on us by government bullies with a badge, central committee command-and-control school educrats, food fascists, health Nazis, and prudish moralistic legislative puritans. This situation is further exacerbated by “public servant” red-tape bureaucrats who further stifle independent choice through their administrative rulings as to what we should or shouldn’t do.
The California state constitution has no provisions for the state or a city legislature to presumptively enact laws that forcibly impose fiat morality, good health, or any other stricture against a free choice by an adult.
We need a new Spirit of 1776 to free ourselves from the tyrannical yoke of a neo-con socialistic liberal do-gooder nanny-state. California and its cities are hell-bent on using fiat legislation to permanently usurp our freedom of choice for our “benefit,” even when we don’t want the dubious benefit.
The founding fathers didn’t voluntarily face a hangman’s noose to form a government that would take our lives, property, and rights away from us for our own good. Californians shouldn’t be tormented by malicious mandatory directives of a nanny state, by a nanny state, for a nanny state.
Give us back our freedom of choices, and get out of our personal lives, Madame Nanny!
Ron Getty is the senior staff member of a tax attorney in San Francisco. His background includes an electrical engineering degree and 30 years of sales, marketing and advertising with small to large corporations.
