Rant of the morning - real estate readers, avert your eyes

California, home of all great ideas, was the first state to ban smoking in restaurants and now many of its cities have expanded that to the smoggy area outside. The ban seems to be working but I do wonder what possible health benefit is achieved by protecting an outdoor cafe patron from inhaling second hand smoke while continuing to expose the poor bastard to the world's foulest air (you say, "China's is worse, but every evening, prevailing winds dump a new load of Chinese poison on poor old California, so they're doubly blessed).

What concerns me, however, and what alarmed a few folks way back when the first smoking ban was imposed, is, "what's next?". Doomsayers predicted,and were scoffed at for their prediction, that this kind of governmental intrusion would spread and of course it has, from calorie counts and trans fat bans in New York City, no foie gras in Chicago, no smoking, alone, in your own car, etc.

Now Los Angeles has banned additional fast food joints in South LA. Leave alone the possibility that these places provided jobs in a blighted area that has never recovered from the Rodney King riots (and before that, the Watts frolics of 1965), what kind of paternalistic beneficence is going on here? Grown adults won't be allowed to buy a $1.00 cheeseburger but must instead opt for a full course tofu dinner that (a) costs far more and (b) doesn't exist within 5 miles of South LA?

Except for those too lazy to cook, the most healthy dinner is probably one you prepare yourself because you have full control and choice of ingredients. Los Angelenos apparently, don't have that option and are forced into the streets where they stuff themselves on the first food offered.

"The people don't want [fast food joints], but when they don't have any other options, they may gravitate to what's there," [Councilwoman Jan]Perry said in Monday's Los Angeles Times. So much for the free market - the city council will now decide what people want and don't want.

The city council exerts this dubious authority on the grounds that the citizens under its control are too fat: obesity consumes public funds to treat so sure, let's "do something" about it and individual choice be damned. "We can't take away their X-boxes" one supporter explains, alluding to the fact that lack of exercise contributes at least as much to the problem of chubby wubbies as cheese does, but why not? Exactly the same rationale applies. In fact,this reasoning opens the door to anything politicians want to impose for the good of "the people" - forced exercise, for instance (you say no, but Barak Obama is floating a proposal for compulsory "volunteer" service, 2 years for every young adult in America, so why not a brief stint of calisthenics each day in the local park, to get ready for that service?)

Even I'm not so old that I can't remember when people were pretty much free to do what they wanted to do so long as they weren't harming anyone else. That freedom has slowly eroded as the kind of people who enjoy telling others what to do have gained ascendancy via a "social cost" argument. We as a society are paying the medical costs for (some) people so we have the right to tell all of you to: wear seat belts; motorcycle helmets; not ingest trans fats; no goose liver (okay, it's not a health cost issue but we also have taken over the prerogative of protecting the well being of geese - so there); and so forth and so on. Just wait until we have national health insurance and we can go after diabetics and juveniles with rotting teeth for consuming too much candy. I admire the optimism of reformers who truly believe that if we all only did as they told us to it would be a wonderful world, but I wonder at, and fear, their combination of naivety and lust for power.

(Rant over.)