Has Mayor Micheal Bloomberg made a little jaunt across the country? Unfortunately not; another nanny government city council is to blame for this ridiculous plan.
The one-year moratorium, proposed by Councilwoman Jan Perry, is aimed at attracting restaurants serving healthier fare to the area, where a study found 30% of children are obese.
A law that would bar fast-food restaurants from opening in South Los Angeles for at least a year sailed through the Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday.
The council approved the fast-food moratorium unanimously, despite complaints from representatives of McDonald’s, Carl’s Jr. and other companies, who said they were being unfairly targeted.
So now we’re not just attacking what is in the foods, but we are physically taking the choice away from people (basically a ‘government-knows-best’ strategy).
We are citizens in a supposedly free country, governed by a Constitution and a Bill of Rights that say a citizen cannot “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
What if my life, my happiness, involves eating grotesque and grease-filled fast-food sandwiches? (it does, for the record). What right does the government have to tell me what I can or cannot eat? They have absolutely no right to do it. In this case, they are forcing people that want this food to go somewhere else, causing inconveniences in order to get a convenience food.
This is the beginning of food zoning. Governments now think that they can withhold food from adults simply because THEY decide it is unhealthy.
The government (be it local or Federal) needs to get it through their thick heads that we can make decisions for ourselves. We don’t want the government sanitizing our life and ‘protecting us from ourselves.’
This is a wholly unacceptable situation. People need to take responsibility for their actions; it’s not the government’s fault or their responsibility that people are fat. If parents don’t want to their kids getting fat off of McDonalds every day, then get control of your kids and don’t let them eat it! That’s not a hard concept to wrap your brain around! But no, but no…we can’t do that. We need laws and zoning requirements and moratoriums on new fast-food restaurants in order to fight this fat issue.
Now, to be fair, I don’t actually think that fast food restaurants are to blame for much of this. Rather, the sedentary lifestyle adopted by today’s kids is what is hurting that situation more. This again stems back to their parents. When I was a kid, I didn’t get a video game system until I was 12, and then I could only play for one hour a day and only AFTER I had finished my chores, my schoolwork and spent time outside.
That sort of regulation by parents is now unheard of. But, pointing the ray of blame back at themselves is too painful, so they wave their arms at the Burger King out the window and demand that the nanny government step in and help make their kids un-fat.
Unfortunately, the nanny government in Los Angeles is now listening.
