Back Away From The 2 Liter

I don’t have any particularly strong feelings about the merits of Bloomberg’s soda ban, but I do think that looking at it in context helps crystallize some things about the mayor’s ideology. Where one might look at a public health crisis and see the need for, say, better access to good health care and nutrition, Bloomberg sees a need for legal prohibitions and behavior modification through negative reinforcement. The state doesn’t exist to provide public goods; it exists to prod people into consuming the right kind of private goods.