Beware the Paternalist: The Dark Side of
Mayor Bloomberg's Philosophy
It shouldn't be surprising that a man intent on banning
salt and trans fats is also complicit in "stop and frisk"
and illegal spying on Muslims.
![mayor mike full.jpg]()
Reuters
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the man atop New York's municipal
government, is a centrist. An independent. A pragmatist. A man
who holds himself above ideology. Says Cory Booker, the mayor
of Newark, "He doesn't give a damn about party, because he's
about progress." He even plays a prominent role in the
non-partisan political movement
No Labels. Would our
polarized nation be better served if more politicians modeled
themselves after the septuagenarian billionaire?
Some people think so. There are two
separate websites
eager to draft him for a presidential run. Over the years,
speculation about him seeking higher office has appeared in
too many press outlets to chronicle. And he's managed to get
elected three times in America's biggest city. In his ensuing
terms in office, critics have maligned him as "Nanny
Bloomberg," a moniker intended to mock his campaigns against
salt, trans fats, outdoor smoking, sugary drinks, and food
donations to homeless shelters that aren't first vetted for
nutritional information. The libertarian objection to these
policies might be summed up as follows: Even if these laws
make New Yorkers safer, what gives government the right to
restrict the freedom of its citizens when they aren't
threatening or coercing or harming anyone save maybe
themselves?
It's a question that's been posed to Bloomberg many times.
"There are powers only governments can exercise, policies only
governments can mandate and enforce, and results only
governments can achieve,"
he
once said. "To halt the worldwide epidemic of
non-communicable diseases, governments at all levels must make
healthy solutions the default social option. That is
ultimately government's highest duty." It's a forthright
answer: If the government can do something that makes people
safer, it must. In fact, it has "no higher duty."
It's a philosophy a lot of liberals are happy to accept when
applied to cigarettes, restaurant ingredients, and the like.
But their tolerance for this mindset is inseparable from its
darker manifestations. In the press, Bloomberg isn't nearly
the bogeyman that Rudy Giuliani was during his stint as mayor,
but that doesn't mean that his record on civil liberties and
minority rights isn't deeply suspect. The New York Civil
Liberties Union explains what is perhaps the most problematic
policy of his tenure. "The police are stopping hundreds of
thousands of law abiding New Yorkers every year, and the vast
majority are black and Latino," the group notes on its "
Stop
and Frisk" issue page. "More than 4 million innocent New
Yorkers were subjected to police stops and street
interrogations from 2004 through 2011, and that black and
Latino communities continue to be the overwhelming target of
these tactics. Nearly nine out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New
Yorkers have been completely innocent, according to the NYPD's
own reports." It isn't every mayor that presides over the
harassment of
millions of innocent people.
More recently, it has come to light that the NYPD under Mayor
Bloomberg has engaged in
systematic,
secret, illegal
spying
on many innocent citizens -- some of them outside the NYPD's
jurisdiction! -- simply because they were Muslim Americans.
That initiative, reminiscent of a police state, is more
alarming and objectionable than the move to restrict salt and
trans fats in the city. But the line separating those policies
isn't nearly as clear as liberal paternalists want to believe.
Mayor Bloomberg isn't the kind of guy who asks himself, before
taking action, "Does government have a right to do this?"
Instead, he asks himself, "Is this going to make people
safer?" That is the underlying logic of nannying, stop and
frisk,
and illegal spying on Muslims.
Do I think
it'll make New Yorkers safer? Then government must do it.
It's a brand of "non-ideological pragmatism" better suited to
Singapore than the United States, yet because it isn't
implicated in the culture wars -- because both Republicans and
Democrats are willing to transgress against minority rights so
long as the people disproportionately affected are poor or
black or Muslim -- Bloomberg is lauded for his spirit of
centrism and reelected in America's flagship blue city. As one
defender
of Bloomberg and the New York police commissioner wrote to the
New York Daily News, "War does not always make
allowances of convenience. The Muslim community should be
thankful that its members are not placed in internment camps.
After all, they, too, are being protected from attack." What a
pragmatic, ideology-free assessment!
Thank goodness the prospect of Bloomberg ascending to the
White House is slim, for it isn't difficult to see where his
disregard for liberty and limits on government would lead.
He's already on record
favoring
a national fingerprint and DNA database. His embrace of
whatever steps he regards as making the citizenry safer is
indistinguishable from the Dick Cheney-John Yoo approach to
balancing liberty and security. And he is, unsurprisingly, a
drug warrior to boot.
A sound rule of thumb, for future reference, is that a man
brazen enough to restrict the amount of salt chefs can use
in their cooking is never going to stop there. Liberty is
best served by rejecting the paternalistic,
ends-justify-the-means approach to public life as soon as it
arises. You never can tell what someone who speaks that way
in public is telling the police to do in secret, because
he's shown everyone that he's too "pragmatic" to worry about
whether he's violating their rights and has no principled
aversion to deciding what's best for everyone else.
