In places like California’s San Rafael City, it is now illegal to smoke in your own home. Because New York City officials can’t be outdone by the west coast’s bureaucratic robber barons — and because they’re addicted to power — they’ve moved on to controlling the lives of those who use e-cigarettes. How weird will it be when they go after candy cigarettes down the road?
The real problem with e-cigarettes, according to [New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Farley] and other supporters of the ban, is that they look too much like the real thing. “E-cigarettes threaten, in my opinion, to undermine enforcement of the Smoke-Free Air Act,” City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said last week. “Because many of the e-cigarettes are designed to look like cigarettes and be used just like them, they can lead to confusion or confrontation.”
You might think that people of ordinary intelligence would pretty quickly learn to distinguish a burning stick of dried vegetable matter from an e-cigarette, which contains no tobacco and produces no smoke. And once they learned the difference, they could explain it to the New York City Council. “These are being touted as safer than cigarettes,” says Councilman James Gennaro, “but we don’t really know that.”
So now it’s okay to work on banning people from activities that look dangerous. It’s okay to ban activities that state planners fear might lead to “confusion” or “confrontation.” When do the bans on toy guns begin?
Where does it end? Answer: It doesn’t.
To the elitist mastermind, you are too dumb to be trusted with sodium consumption. You are too dumb to decide how much soda to drink in a single sitting. You are too dumb to decide how much water your toilet uses per flush and what kind of light bulbs you use in your home. You are too dumb to decide which health care plans are best for you — particularly if you’re young and healthy and only want a package that only includes catastrophic coverage. In the quest to create heaven on earth, officials addicted to the task create hellish fiefdoms all over the globe.
The reason why the compulsive do-gooder is so dangerous is because his regulations come in drips and drops over time. Whether you liken it to Chinese water torture or death by 10,000 paper cuts the results are the same — a slow death. Ironically, the bureaucratic busybody’s endless attempts to prevent individuals from harming themselves only hastens the death of free nations.
Related: When idiots dream big, they dream of Mayor Bloomberg
