The Food and Drug Administration has announced that it will soon
require the manufacturers of many food products to use less salt.
They assure us that the changes will be calibrated so that
consumers will barely notice them. That raises the question: Is
there anything (other than sex) that the government can’t
regulate?
If people want less salt in their food, manufacturers will
respond to their desires. As in fact they have already done.
Stroll down your supermarket aisles and look at the number of
products that come in a low-sodium variety. Soups. Juices.
Peanuts. Crackers. Soda water. Cereals. Snacks. Cheese. Unsalted
tops on Saltines! Frozen chicken Parmesan, cheese ravioli,
chicken picatta. Chili. Vegetable enchiladas. Even sodium-free
salt!
Why so many? Because consumers — the market — demanded
them, and manufacturers responded.
But that’s not good enough for Big Brother. He wants
everybody to use low-sodium products, and he wants more of them.
BB says it’s healthy.
Maybe it is. But whose choice is it to be healthy? The
individual citizen’s or nanny government’s? Ah, says BB, but some
people are … well, you know, too stupid to realize that less
sodium may be better for them.
The result is that we will all have to live in a society
regulated for the stupidest among us. Is that really what America
is all about?
And of course, requiring manufacturers to use less salt has
to be just the beginning. The resulting product will be so easy
to alter. Just — add salt! What will Big Brother do then?
He will outlaw salt, that’s what he’ll do. Perhaps not in
the home, but in restaurants. You laugh? In New York City, Big
Brother Bloomberg (the mayor) outlawed trans fats in restaurants
in 2006. Two years later, California banned trans fats in all
restaurants in the state. And this spring Assemblyman Felix
Ortiz, a Democratic from Brooklyn, introduced a bill into the New
York State legislature banning any and all salt in public eating
places in the state.
You say you will bring your own? Please. Big Brothers
Bloomberg and Ortiz will be waiting for you. It will be a
misdemeanor to bring salt into a restaurant, as it is, even now,
illegal in many places to take an open bottle of wine out of a
restaurant. That was easy.
But what about private eating places — assuming the
concept continues to exist in Big Brother’s world? How will BB
keep you from eating salt at home? Easy again. He will tax it.
Look what BB did to cigarettes. Would $10 a pound cut into your
salt habit? How about $20? Maybe $30?
The rationale is easy to understand — if you put yourself
in the shoes of a bright young Harvard man who knows much more
about everything than someone like us will ever know. He will
look out for me and you. As a McDonald’s jingle of the 1970s
went, “We do it all for you-ou-ou.”
Why does the government want to regulate our behavior?
There are at least two reasons, one stated, the other not.
The stated reason will be that since the government is
paying for our health care, it has the right to make us behave in
ways that are healthy in order to keep our medical bills down. It
isn’t fair for us to burden our fellow taxpaying
citizens because we don’t behave properly — because we eat too
much salt.
The other, and the real, reason is power: big-government
types, like President Obama and his crowd, exist to control other
people.
They have two goals: making the citizens utterly dependent
on government (them), and managing every aspect of the citizens’
lives. That is the leftist, progressive dream. And it is rapidly
becoming a reality. In the land of the free.
Once upon a time, some people thought government might
reach the end of regulating. Everything that could, reasonably,
be regulated, would be regulated. Smoking prohibitions. Seatbelt
requirements. Toilets that don’t flush. Trans-fat-free
restaurants. And the thousands of other regulations contained in
the tens of thousands of pages of the Federal Register.
That is fundamentally to misunderstand the nature of Big
Government People. There will never be an end to what the BGPs
want to regulate. And as time goes on, the regulations will
intrude more and more into the citizens’ lives because the less
intrusive regulations will already have been passed.
If the people really object to a regulation, the
bright Harvard men will always fall back on the need to protect
not just us, but also “the children,” the permanent wards of that
village Hillary the Lamp Thrower and her intern-molesting husband
lectured us about.
Even if the bright Harvard men could protect us, the real
question is: Do we want to be safe and healthy, or do we want to
be free?
An old-fashioned American will answer, “Free.” A
progressive (a white-shoe socialist), having learned nothing from
the history of the twentieth century, will prefer life in the
Guiding State — especially if he is doing the guiding.
What can the freedom-loving American citizen do? When is
too much regulation too much to take? When should civil
disobedience begin?
Surely not over salt.
But salt is not the issue. The issue is freedom. If it’s
okay to be civilly disobedient to demand freedom for blacks, why
not also to demand not to have all of American life regulated,
even if it’s for the sake of the neglected children the
progressives tell us it takes a village to raise? After all, the
civil-rights movement began because some lady wanted a different
seat on a bus.
But of course that fuss wasn’t about the bus seat. It was
about freedom. Now blacks can sit wherever they want on a bus.
But soon they won’t be able to eat salt.
In 1961, William F. Buckley Jr. expressed the hope that
“when the Negroes have finally realized their long dream of
attaining to the status of the white man, the white man will
still be free ….”
He won’t be, unless he pays more notice to the deliberate,
calibrated attenuation of his freedom.
