“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas


Tuesday, April 20, 2010

The nanny-State marches ever onward


First Mayor Bloomberg of New York decided that residents of, and tourists to his city, ate too much salt so, he tried to regulate the amount of salt that restaurants could use in food preparation. Now the federal government wants to regulate all salt in the diet of Americans......

From Hotair -- The Food and Drug Administration is planning an unprecedented effort to gradually reduce the salt consumed each day by Americans, saying that less sodium in everything from soup to nuts would prevent thousands of deaths from hypertension and heart disease. The initiative, to be launched this year, would eventually lead to the first legal limits on the amount of salt allowed in food products.

See, here's the modus operandi of any well-schooled government bureaucrat:
Step1-talk about a crisis of some kind and throw out a bunch of bogus statistics that make the public afraid.
Step2- offer condescending, paternal advice on how to change lifestyles to address whatever the problem is.
Step3- wait a believable amount of time and announce that your advice has not worked and that government action is needed to prevent a catastrophe. By then, the people will be so worried, they'll accept any restrictions you impose on them because they believe it's for their own good.
The only problem is when a study comes out debunking the foundation upon which your original crisis lay.....

High-salt diets may not increase the risk of death, contrary to long-held medical beliefs, according to investigators from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.

But a good, liberal bureaucrat never lets little things like facts or the truth get in the way of his seizure of a slice of the American economy. This is just like cap-and-trade. CO2 has been shown to be harmless plant food and there's no proof that it contributes to any rise in global temperature or sea levels yet, our congress is pressing forward with legislation to regulate CO2 production.
With liberals, it's never about the actual crisis they conjured up with which to terrify you. It's always about taking control of every facet of our lives. The crises are just convenient excuses for it.

4 comments:

Bill Lockhart said...

What they don't tell you is that in studies of hypertension only about 25% of patients are salt sensitive. In other words salt only affects blood pressure in only 25% of sick people--NOT all people. They tend to leave that out. Get the sick ones to stop the salt and I bet the supposed deaths will go away.

ed said...

I did not know that. You have to be salt-sensitive for your BP to be affected radically by sodium?

Hmmmmm.

Bill Lockhart said...

Yes, and that is OLD news. I learned it in medical school. It was used to determine the liklihood that a population would respond to a diuretic whic causes salt loss. It worked in only 20% of caucasians but worked in 80% of Blacks (no Asians studied I guess). So salt restriction and diuretics were more the practice for blacks and beta-blockers with a lesser degree of direutic and salt restriction use done. The the fancy new drugs like calcium channel blockers, alpha-blockers, ACE inhibitors kept rolling out and everyone started using those. Drug reps always did bring nice lunches and take you out to nice dinners- with an educational lecture of course- on their product. But that never affected the prescribing practices. Heavens no.

ed said...

Heh heh....I'll bet it didn't.