But if you are the mayor of New York, no such constraints apply. You can simply announce, as Michael Bloomberg did, that the city is starting a “nationwide initiative” to pressure the food industry and restaurant chains to cut salt intake by half over the next decade. Why bother with consent forms when you can automatically enroll everyone in the experiment?Bloomberg is a gnat type menace. I picture this tiny little Napoleonesque whiner sitting on his thrown at Chambers Street shelling out edicts while aids scramble to make sure his oat meal is exactly 105 degrees F.
And why bother with a control group when you already know the experiment’s outcome? The city’s health commissioner, Thomas R. Frieden, has enumerated the results. If the food industry follows the city’s wishes, the health department’s Web site announces, “that action will lower health care costs and prevent 150,000 premature deaths every year.”
But that prediction is based on an estimate based on extrapolations based on assumptions that have yet to be demonstrated despite a half-century of efforts. No one knows how people would react to less-salty food, much less what would happen to their health.
Last summer he made it illegal to leave the door to your business open (a common effort to lure in potential customers off the beastly hot street into the beckoning air conditioning). That was to cure "global warming." Then, his hindendness decided that trans fatty acids in NYC sold food had to go. There was an effort to apply "congestion" taxes and fees below a certain street level in Manhattan. When he couldn't get that passed, he decided to compound the problem by disallowing vehicles in Times Square.
Now, with the twist of a hand, an a short dab of the lips with his perfumed hankerchief...Napoleon has decided to control salt intake of the city dwellers.
Pssst...he's allegedly a Republican. He is quite surely an egomaniac.
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