Life is a Highway

Life is a Highway
Source: Haiku Deck

Monday, September 3, 2012

Reason Magazine: 'Nanny of the Month (August 2012) Stimulus Money Used to Support Soda Taxes'




Source:Reason Magazine- U.S. Secretary of Heath and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.

"Our nation's nannies have turned up the heat this summer.

August's slate of control freaks includes the silver state statists who might fine you 2,000 bucks for the crime of teaching someone how to apply makeup, and the Phoenix code enforcer who busted a woman for handing out free water in 112-degree heat (!) because she didn't have a license. 

Yet neither could managed to muster the the meddling of this month's top pick. Using federal taxpayers' dough (we're talking stimulus and Obamacare cash) to implement local-level soda taxes and other nanny state laws certainly violates good taste, but the Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General thinks it might also violate federal anti-lobbying provisions.  

Presenting Reason TV's Nanny of the Month for August 2012: Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius!

About 75 seconds."  


The main problem with central government planning, whether it comes from the Far-Left, which is generally about economic policy, but some social policy as well, or the Far-Right, which is generally about social policy, but some economic policy as it relates to labor, is that you have these groups of individuals who know what's best for everyone else, including people they don't even know. Which is why it's not just a huge, big government intrusion on individual freedom, but why these big government policies tend to fail.

Source:Real Life Journal- as bad as Washington can be, not all of the Nanny Statists live there.

Actually, I don't agree with this Nanny of The Month show from Reason. I did agree with the Nanny of The Month's for June and July. Mayor Mike Bloomberg essentially trying to outlaw soft drinks in New York and the people in Massachusetts trying to outlaw cursing in public. Thats exactly what political nannies are, people who try to protect others from themselves. 

What Secretary of Health Kathleen Sebelius was trying to do with her wellness campaign is preventive health care. Something we have to do as a country in order to bring down our health care costs.

What they are doing here is passing out funds from the Federal Government to encourage wellness campaigns. Not outlawing junk food, or junk drinks, but encouraging healthy dieting and exercise. Which is in our national interest, because it would bring down the health care costs for the country. 

This is not saying: "You have to eat and drink healthy and you have to exercise and if you don't, we'll lock you up in jail." Where you'll get less exercise and eat worse food, which is what we do in the War on Drugs, the definition of making problems worse by finding a problem, not only not fixing it, but making it worse.

The lady who got fined for handing out free water during one of the hottest summers we've ever had, which we are still having in most of the country, is a much better example of a nanny than the preventive health care campaign. And I would bet the fine that lady is going to have to pay is as much as we would be paying in sales taxes had she bought that water in a store and thats what this fine is about. This big government here thinking they were cheated in losing sales tax revenue. Because the people who got the bottle water got it for free and didn't pay sales taxes on it. 

You can also see this post at The Daily Review, on Blogger. 

You can also see this post at FreeState Now, on Blogger.

2 comments:

  1. You can also see this post at The Daily Review:https://thedailyreview1975.blogspot.com/2012/09/reason-nanny-of-month-for-august-2012.html on Blogger.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You can also see this post at FreeState Now:http://freestatenow.blogspot.com/2012/09/reason-nanny-of-month-for-august-2012.html on Blogger.

    ReplyDelete

All Comments that are on topic are welcome at Real Life Journal. Spam and personal comments are not and will be marked as spam.