March 21, 2012

NYC bureaucrats ban food donations to homeless!

A New York City TV station reports that the city will no longer allow food to be donated to homeless people.

I felt certain this had to be a misunderstanding, but later in the linked article they got confirmation from the mayor himself:
Mayor Bloomberg...was unapologetic.

“For the things that we run because of all sorts of safety reasons, we just have a policy it is my understanding of not taking donations,” Bloomberg said.

According to the article this is a recent Bloomberg policy. But notice how Bloomberg tries to shift the origin of this policy to some earlier administration: "We just have a policy...." Like, ya know, it just, you know, happened, and there's nothing we can do about it.

This is insane--nanny government on steroids.

Reminds me of stories from the 90's about the FDA busting Americans returning from Mexico and bringing pharmaceutical drugs from that country to treat U.S. AIDs patients. The FDA's rationale was "You can't treat yourself with a drug we haven't approved, cuz who knows, it might not be safe!!

They were saying this to folks who had gotten a disease that at the time was almost universally fatal.

After thousands of busts, someone in the FDA finally realized how absurd that "reasoning" was, and how bad it was making the feds look, and they quietly backed off.

Kinda like TSA morons frisking six-year-olds at airport "security".

I can picture a day in the near future when some starving kid has managed to score a loaf of stale bread from a dumpster, and just as he's about to dig in, a squad of Health Police snatch the bread out of his hands and give him a summons for "intent to eat unapproved food."

This is sheer idiocy. I'm gonna suggest (mostly in jest) a law prescribing the death penalty to any bureaucrat who won't swear to not enforce stupid-ass regulations.

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