Today is my birthday, and I am happy it won’t go down as the day that New York Mayor succeeded in introducing his absurd soft drink restrictions. As the New York Post reports:
A state judge today put a cork in City Hall’s plans to ban Big Apple restaurants and other venues from selling large sugary drinks — a bubble-bursting defeat for Mayor Bloomberg, who has made public health a cornerstone of his tenure.
Before the stunning ruling by New York Supreme Court Judge Milton Tingling, restaurants, movie theaters, sports venues, convenience stores and other places regulated by the city’s health department would have been prohibited — starting tomorrow — from selling sugary drinks of more than 16 ounces.
For those of us used to the metric system 16 ounces is about half a litre (0.4731765 litres to be precise). That means you can buy soft drink in cans, and that is about it. As I posted earlier, the silly rule is leading to bizarre unintended consequences that needn’t reduce the sugar and calories being consumed.
As a comment piece argued in another outlet, despite years of courts expanding the role of government finally a court has said enough:
Far more important was the city’s decision to give itself far-ranging power to act in the name of public health. By saying it had the right to tell people how much soda they could drink in this manner it was creating a government monster “that would leave its authority to define, create, mandate and enforce limited only by its own imagination.” The result would be to “create an administrative Leviathan.” In doing so, the judge highlighted the fact that this controversy isn’t about whether sugared drinks are healthy but whether the impulse to do good gives Bloomberg, New York or any legislature or government bureaucrat unlimited power to restrict individual rights.
The article continues:
If we are now a nation that treats the fad of organic food as a religious obligation and worships health the way we once celebrated moral behavior or piety, so be it. But if we are to translate these beliefs into law then the same danger applies to other attempts to legislate certain types of morality.
A government that can tell citizens what to eat or drink or how much can be legally consumed is one in which individual liberty is now considered a less important value than the dictates of dieticians. Neither the obesity epidemic nor any other health issue based in individual choice can give New York City, or any other government, such power. We can only hope that Judge Tingling’s ruling stands and prevents further attacks on liberty in New York and any other place where politicians seek to use public health as a lever to abrogate individual rights.
According to the New York Post article Judge Tingling (pardon the carbon-infused surname pun) argued:
Bloomberg and the Board of Health overstepped their bounds, to enforce rules that should be established by the legislative bodies.
“The rule would not only violate the separation of powers doctrine, it would eviscerate it,” Tingling wrote. “Such an evisceration has the potential to be more troubling than sugar sweetened drinks.”
Tingling sided with a coalition of store keepers, unions, theater owners and beverage sellers who have been fighting Bloomberg’s ban that was set to go into effect tomorrow.
“It is arbitrary and capricious because it applies to some but not all food establishments in the city, it excludes other beverages that have significantly higher concentrations of sugar sweeteners and/or calories on suspect grounds, and the loopholes inherent in the rule, including but not limited to no limitations on refills, defeat and/or serve to gut the purpose of the rule,” Tingling wrote.
The man trying to outdo Nicola Roxon’s title as consumer and commercial freedom enemy number one, Mayor Michael Bloomberg responded by saying:
“I got to defend my children and you and everybody else and do what’s right to save lives,” he angrily said. “Obesity kills. There’s just no question about it.”
Many people might find this argument appealing, but it is an essentially irrational proposition. There are boundaries to the arbitrary and endless extent that government can keep people safe and healthy. The consequences of obesity are serious. But that doesn’t automatically result in government having the responsibility to address them, or even that they are the best to do so. The article continues:
Tingling was particularly miffed with the sliding standard of who would be covered by the ban and not.
For example, supermarkets and large chain stores don’t fall under city regulations and wouldn’t have been impacted by the ban. But local, mom-and-pop bodegas would have been forced to adhere to the 16-ounce ban.
“The simple reading of the rule leads to the earlier acknowledged uneven enforcement even within a particular city block, much less the city as a whole … the loopholes in this rule effectively defeat the state purpose of the rule,” the judge said.
Tingling said this public-health debate should clearly be in the hands of lawmakers like the City Council or state legislature. Those bodies have never refused to take up this weighty matter, the judge said.
“There is no rational argument purporting to demonstrate legislative inaction in this area,” Tingling wrote.
“Addressing the obesity issue as it related to sugar-sweetened drinks, or sugary drinks, is the subject of past and ongoing debate with the city and state legislatures.”
It seems Bloomberg won’t quit while he is behind and is challenging the ruling on appeal. Sigh.
