America's image of New Yorkers combines swagger, style and an unwillingness to get pushed around. Humphrey Bogart once warned a Nazi commander in "Casablanca" that "there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade." Seventy years ago, movie audiences would have laughed in appreciation of the city's toughness.
Today, however, Rick Blaine would hardly recognize the place. Mayor Michael Bloomberg hit the panic button over soft drinks this week, proposing a citywide ban on any serving of sugary-sweet soda more than 16 ounces in restaurants, movie theaters and street carts. Bloomberg claims that he needs to have the cops throw themselves between consumers and liquid refreshment to save citizens from themselves and prevent obesity. Big Gulp, meet Big Brother.
This is just the latest intervention staged by Hizzoner. His past decrees banned smoking, not just indoors in places of business, but also outside of businesses and in parks. Bloomberg also banned restaurants from cooking with artificial trans fats. In those cases, he took a lot of criticism as being a health hysteric and a food nanny, but at least an argument existed that consumer choice might have been irrelevant. Restaurants don't usually advertise all of their ingredients on the menu, for instance, and few people get asked permission before someone lights a cigarette in the doorway of an establishment.
In this case, though, no such argument exists. People purchase the volume of beverage they desire, and in almost every case, plenty of choice exists for smaller quantities. The outcome of barring the sale of anything larger than 16 ounces of Coca-Cola or Pepsi at the ballpark will be that more containers will get thrown out as people just buy more units, and that waste will have to be disposed of later. Consumers will pay more and have more inconvenience in purchasing what they want to drink, and will still end up drinking the same amount anyway.
