The Salt have Lost His Savour

It is thenceforth good for nothing except to be cast out on streets after snow storms, and to be trodden under foot of men who won't slip. As salt trucks rolled across New York City, Marcia Kramer of wcbstv.com reports that Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pressuring restaurants and food manufacturers to reduce the salt content in their products by 50% over ten years ("Mayor Bloomberg Declares War On ... Salt").

I wish that city officials had claimed market failure for their actions. They could have said they were bargaining for citizens who could not mobilize at a reasonable cost to bargain for themselves, but they added more evidence that government officials believes that New Yorkers are stupid. Kramer reports that,

City officials said that people don't realize the salt content of the things they buy in the supermarket.

Reason's Jacob Sullum provides evidence that Mayor Bloomberg's concern may be unwarranted ("Can a New York Bureaucrat Put the Whole Country on a Low-Salt Diet?," January 29, 2009).

In a 2002 review of the research, Alderman, a past president of the American Society of Hypertension, concluded that "existing evidence provides no support for the highly unlikely proposition that a single dietary sodium intake is an appropriate or desirable goal for the entire population." Despite the weakness of the evidence, Alderman noted, the dogma of less salt is still "preached with a fervour usually associated with religious zealotry."

Mayor Bloomberg cares a great deal about his citizens' health. He has previously banned work place smoking and trans fats, and forced restaurants to post the caloric content of their foods. Commenting on the work place smoking ban, Bloomberg said (Justine Blau, "NYC Smoking Ban Debuts," March 30, 2003),

Fundamentally, people just don't want the guy next to them smoking.

The Mayor is an former smoker, and we all know how they are. In the past, when I was in a work environment with smokers, I always asked the former smokers to confront the smokers. They are zealots. I helped. I nodded in the back with others in timid agreement.

The mayor demonstrates no trust in individuals to solve problems on their own. He must be awfully smart. But he is not alone. Government officials at all levels are willing to micro manage other people telling them what televisions they can buy, what carbonated beverages they should drink, and how properly to measure their vegetables. It could be that Bloomberg and his ilk in government are like Mary Poppins, "nearly perfect in every way," but recent evidence suggests otherwise.