The food and health Nazis have been aiming at smoking, fast food, trans-fat, and sweets for a while; now they are making a big push to get the government to regulate how much salt you should have in your diet.The crux of their argument is that salt is killing 150,000 Americans a year, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). According to their little liberal brains, the financial impact of all these people dying from too much salt on our health care system and government funded hospitals makes this a public policy issue.
Even if their estimate of 150,000 deaths is accurate, the real question that has to be answered is this: How far are we going to let the government and the Marxists who want to run America intrude into our personal lives, even telling us how much salt we should ingest?
Our Constitution provides no role for the Federal government to monitor, guide, or influence our personal choice in what we eat or drink. Despite this fact, the Federal government, through agencies like the FDA, Dept. of Agriculture, and HHS, has slowly been strangling our liberties in what has really been the second-to-last bastion of freedom: what we decide we should eat.
What happens if we decide to apply the CSPI's rationale to other areas of personal choice?
For instance, Julian Bond, the chairman of the NAACP, has written in the Washington Post: "The face of AIDS in the United States is primarily black as well. The majority of new HIV infections here are black, the majority of people who die from AIDS here are black and the people most at risk of contracting this virus in the United States are black."
Surely the thousands of blacks who contract HIV in the USA each year have a huge financial impact on our health care system and government run hospitals. Using the CSPI's rationale, wouldn't it make sense for the government to regulate the sexual activity of the black community? Perhaps registering blacks as accepted sexual partners, issuing sex licenses, or requiring a blacks to complete a Federally mandated course on sexual relations would be the answer.
Also, according the CDC: "In the U.S. during 2004, 4,767 teens ages 16 to 19 died of injuries caused by motor vehicle crashes. During 2005, nearly 400,000 motor vehicle occupants in this age group sustained nonfatal injuries severe enough to require treatment in an emergency department (CDC 2006)."
I guess the Federal government should now over-step its Constitutional bounds and not let 16-19 year old kids ride in cars. After all, 400,000 emergency room visits puts a tremendous financial burden on the public.
If either of these proposals were suggested in all sincerity by a consumer advocacy group, the public outcry and rage would be so intense as to spill out into the streets. Charges of racism, bigotry, and insensitivity would be heard from one coast to the other.
But the food and health Nazi's are patient. Just like a computer virus working it's way through your operating system, the Marxists will slowly work their way through the firewalls protecting our freedoms and liberties until we have to ask the government for permission to wipe our behinds and blow our noses.
In the meantime, pass the salt.....
