Don’t even think about drinking that large soda, salting your food, or owning a gun — ‘cause Mikey Claus is comin’ to town, or at least the White House (he hopes). He’s makin’ a list and checking it twice of freedoms he’s sure are naughty or nice. But is ex-NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg compelled to control others because he can’t control himself?
Writer Karen Kataline sure thinks so. Wondering what causes a man worth $60 billion to expend time and fortune controlling others’ dietary habits, she recently brought to light some eyebrow-raising facts about Bloomberg.
Many Bloomberg-esque passions and proclamations are already known, such as his anti-Second Amendment efforts, which include advancing “Red Flag” laws; his claim that Chinese dictator Xi Jinping is not a dictator; and his spending massive amounts of money to elect statists. But what’s below is less known. Bear in mind when reading it that this is the man who as NYC mayor declared war on salt, tried to ban large soft drinks, prohibited trans fats in restaurants, and banned food donations to homeless shelters because the foodstuffs’ salt content and other nutritional stats couldn’t be gauged.
As Kataline relates, quoting a 2009 New York Times article describing Bloomberg’s eating habits, “He dumps salt on almost everything, even saltine crackers. He devours burnt bacon and peanut butter sandwiches. He has a weakness for hot dogs, cheeseburgers, and fried chicken, washing them down with a glass of merlot. And his snack of choice? Cheez-Its.”
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“Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is about control,” Kataline then writes. “Controlling one’s out-of-control thoughts, feelings and behavior by attempting to control his external environment. Consciously or unconsciously, those afflicted do this in vain, to the point where they feel unable to control the compulsion as well (as in excessive hand-washing).”
“Most sufferers aren’t dangerous unless they have 65 billion dollars and a God-complex,” she notes.
This thesis makes sense, of course. It’s also perhaps encouraged by a certain fashionable worldview. That is, if you believe people are shaped mainly or solely by their environment — the behaviorist position that gained currency especially post-WWII (though it has lost some sway) — it follows that you may blame your woes on your environment. It also then follows that, on some level, you may feel that changing your environment will help you change yourself.
It’s also possible that arrogance and the phenomenon whereby people naturally project their own mindsets onto others factor in here. The thinking may be: If the great Michael Bloomberg can’t control himself in these respects, how could the dumb yahoos not worth billions of dollars do it? They must be externally controlled!
This would accord with how someone who once worked for Bloomberg, writer Robert Hutchinson, characterized the billionaire as “petty, arrogant and full of contempt for ordinary workers.” He has also been called “a nasty bit of work.” But then there’s this, also from the aforementioned Times article: Bloomberg “is known to grab food off the plates of aides and, occasionally, even strangers. (‘Delicious,’ he declared recently, after swiping a piece of fried calamari from an unsuspecting diner in Staten Island.)”
Kataline writes of this “that Bloomberg has great difficulty respecting the basic boundaries of civil society. No wonder it’s so easy for him to help himself to your freedoms and your choices, when he can’t stop helping himself to your calamari.” She makes the case that the stigma against telling others how to live and controlling their lives is now gone, and it must be reestablished. Yet there is a deeper issue here.
In reality, government and society have always controlled others via, respectively, laws and social codes; the only variants are the nature and degree of the control. Note here that almost every law (if not every one) is by definition the removal of a freedom, as it states that there is something you must or mustn’t do. Thus is a law also the imposition of a value, as it’s created because some people somewhere value what it allegedly accomplishes.
Yet while that’s true of any law, a just law is something different: the imposition of a moral or a corollary thereof. To understand this, just consider: Would it be justifiable to prohibit people from doing something that wasn’t wrong? Would it be right to compel people to do something that wasn’t a moral imperative? If it’s not a matter of Truth, it’s one of taste — and only a tyrant enforces taste.
For example, late Venezuelan demagogue Hugo Chávez destroyed golf courses because he hated the game, considering it bourgeois. That’s enforcing taste based on prejudice. On the other hand, laws against murder, rape, and theft are just because they reflect moral principles.
(Some say that such laws exist because those acts hurt others. But if it weren’t wrong to hurt others, there’d be no good reason for the prohibitions’ existence. Note here that we don’t outlaw just war even though prosecuting such does hurt others.)
Moreover, acts such as adultery were illegal in biblical times, and sodomy was prohibited in much of America not that long ago, precisely because they were considered immoral behaviors. I’m not now arguing that this conception of morality is or isn’t correct, nor does this imply that everything immoral should be illegal. The only point is that all societies and governments seek to control others — and they must.
The problem with the Left is that their moral compass is badly skewed, leading to a flawed conception of the nature and scope of what should be controlled. Compelling Christian businessmen to service faux (same-sex) “weddings” isn’t the imposition of morality; it’s the imposition of immorality. Punishing people for not using MUSS pronouns that didn’t even exist some years ago isn’t the imposition of morality, but of lunacy. Prohibiting reparative therapy isn’t the imposition of morality, but prejudice. And avoiding excess salt, sugar, fat, and smoking tobacco are good ideas, but enforcing “good-ideaism” isn’t government’s role.
Unfortunately, Bloomberg is the epitome of the skewed-moral-compass, nanny-state leftist. (For a full, shocking list of his ban ambitions, click here.) His arrogant ignorance prevents him from realizing that his laughable lack of willpower is a story with a moral: Our very human inability to completely control ourselves illustrates why we should never, ever try to completely control others.
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
