New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is at it again.
His nanny-statist administration, infamous for enacting food and other government dictates in a relentless assault against New Yorkers’ individual rights, recently announced that, because it can’t vouch for what it regards as nutritional content, the city will reject food donations to government-run facilities that serve New York City’s homeless.
You read that right. New York City will turn away those who seek to feed the homeless—on the grounds that food must be approved by the state.
The New York Post reports that a Bloomberg administration document identifies food that can be served at state-sponsored facilities. The directive apparently dictates serving sizes. Also on the list: salt, fat and caloric content. Food safety is cited as one of the reasons.
Bloomberg, who recently cracked down on restaurants with new restrictions, is claiming credit for cleaner kitchens, a decrease in food poisoning—even an uptick in the city’s restaurant business.
He tries to justify the Big Government approach as practical.
“The fact is that we want restaurants to succeed,” Mayor Bloomberg said last week in his radio address.
No, he doesn’t. If he did, he’d leave businesses alone to make and serve food in a free market. The latest government ban proves that he doesn’t even want people to be free to choose to feed the city’s homeless.
Mayor Bloomberg’s food dictatorship powerfully demonstrates that the real purpose of government control is government control—statist power for its own sake—not the welfare of others. That people are banned from donating food to help the homeless is an outrage and it ought to offend every decent New Yorker.
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