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Harry's Freedom Foxhole - Mike Bloomberg Is Your Dad

Bloomberg's ideal NYC consists of athletic doctors, lawyers, and hedge fund managers biking along properly designated bike routes and having genial conversations about how awful cigarettes are.

If you’ve lived in New York City during the reign of three-term Mayor Michael Bloomberg, you’ve witnessed his efforts to make the city more “livable.” Bloomberg’s ideal New York consists of thin, athletic doctors, lawyers, and hedge fund managers biking along properly designated bike routes and having genial, profanity-free conversations about how awful cigarettes are and how great Mike Bloomberg is. If these hale, financially-secure professionals encounter a bag left unattended or a homeless person, they immediately inform the NYPD via Bluetooth, and the cops silently appear—as if melting out of the walls—and dispose of the problem. “Whatever happened to that homeless guy we saw?” one of the bikers will ask as he sips on a smoothie made from locally-sourced ingredients inside the penthouse of a LEED Gold-certified building. “Oh, he was turned into clean-burning energy,” another will say as he logs on Bloomberg.com to get breaking financial news and analysis. “Aren’t Fuhrer Bloomberg’s policies great?” Then they will laugh, flashing their perfect teeth in the warm glow of the energy-efficient lighting fixtures.

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Bloomberg has gone a long way towards reaching this dream city. Under him, New York has banned trans fats and become a shining city on a hill for the anti-smoking movement, as cigarette taxes skyrocketed and ban after ban was enacted—today, you can’t even smoke in parks--and having a gun in the city is now basically illegal. Bloomberg’s administration has run subway ads telling people to be paranoid about bags left on the train, stop littering, stop smoking before you lose fingers, and stop drinking soda because you’re getting fat, fatso. He tried to prohibit food stamp recipients from buying unhealthy drinks (because the only thing worse than a poor person is a fat poor person, amiright?), until the federal government told him no. Oh, and 50,000 marijuana arrests a year, even after cops allegedly cut down on illegal searches? Yup, that’s happening. Oh yeah, and it was Bloomberg’s cops who have arrested and attacked not just Occupy protesters, but reporters trying to do their jobs. (In Bloomberg’s dream city, the only press is press owned by Bloomberg.)

To young New Yorkers—who just want to work enjoyably high-stress jobs and be in bands and get loaded and fuck each other and generally pretend they are in a movie—Bloomberg is a Ward Cleaver-esque father figure frowning down on them and telling them to pick up after themselves, ride their bikes more, and smoke fewer cigarettes. And now he’s not only telling them to stop getting too fucked up at bars, he’s actually trying to make it harder for them to do so, by restricting alcohol sales, and potentially banning alcohol ads on the subway.

So, first of all, I should make the disclaimer that, like fatty foods and cigarettes, drinking a lot is really bad for you and can fuck up your life real bad. The question is, should people be free to make bad decisions? Or should the government force people to be healthier, possibly through a communist China-style mass workplace exercise regimes? I guess you could make the argument that for the sake of maximizing a city’s (or country’s) efficiency or per-capita income, you should make sure that its workforce is as healthy as possible and not getting drunk so much that it is causing society-wide problems (this is actually happening in Russia). But then you have to ask yourself how far you want to take government-mandated health projects—what about making processed foods and tobacco straight-up illegal? Wouldn’t that be “good” for everyone? What about giving joggers tax breaks? What about shutting down alcohol sales at midnight? How far do Bloomberg’s nanny-like state initiatives have to go before they start getting oppressive?

There are other places with restrictions on alcohol (Utah, for one, Iran for another), but most of those places have anti-booze laws on the books for religious reasons. Only in Bloomberg’s New York do you have laws that stem explicitly from a desire to make citizens “healthier.”

Personally, I’d like to hang out in a smoke-filled bar and get drunk, and maybe smoke weed and eat some fatty foods later, without having to worry about the police fining me. I don’t want to exercise, because fuck you, I didn’t dream as a kid of coming to the big glittery city to jog. I don’t really appreciate having my bag randomly searched when I’m taking the train, and I don’t need a fucking poster to tell me that a big can of corn syrup-flavored Arizona Iced Tea is bad for me. Bloomberg wants to make New York healthy and livable, but what about citizens who don’t want to be healthy, and prefer their town to be a little more like New York and a little less like Portland? I guess we’ll just have to shut up and listen to daddy.

Previously - The TSA Took My Baby Away