Nanny State Loons in Seattle - Where it's now illegal to do ANYTHING!

What if I decided that I knew what was best for you and also had the authority to implement changes in your life that you personally found abhorrent? Why is it different if instead of me making those changes, it's some idiotic city council or neighborhood association, etc.? The truth is that it isn't really different. One of the worst offenders of individual rights is Seattle - The Emerald City. Here's an article that discusses how out-of-control we have gotten. Excerpt.

You hear all kinds of hyperbole from the lips of nanny statists these days. In Seattle, it ties in nicely with the city's long tradition of hyperearnest citizens, people the critic H.L. Mencken called "uplifters." Those are the folks who "know" what's good for everyone else and have no tolerance for anything they consider against the rules of clean living. They seek to ban whatever activity they don't like. That's often the way of social conservatives, the people who helped bring about Prohibition in the last century and today want to ban a woman's right to choose or eliminate gay rights. They know what's good for everyone because, often, their religious conviction tells them so.

But of late, liberals and progressives around the country are acting just as religious, except many wrap their arguments in the secular prophecy of public-health officials and all-knowing advocacy groups. Progressives are going after "rights" connected to behavior they consider unhealthful. They want to ban smoking completely. They want to so limit alcohol consumption that the speakeasy, once again, becomes reality. They want to ban gun ownership. They want to control what people eat. In Seattle, nannies like Mayor Greg Nickels want to drive strip clubs out of business. And, if progressives cannot get their way through education and mass-media campaigns, then they will resort to the ballot box, coercion, and in the case of Washington state government, a call for social discrimination.

It is clear that at some point, when we finally decide we've had enough and redesign our Constitution to protect our rights, that we are seriously going to have to list every right that people should have that the government should not be allowed to step on. In the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers the Bill of Rights was debated and Alexander Hamilton warned against the bill of rights suggesting that if we list these 10 rights, we'll have to list them all. Looks like he was right.

Here's more:

Last fall, Nickels and the Seattle City Council imposed new restrictions on the city's four strip clubs. The next day, hundreds of newspapers around the world picked up a wire story that made "world-class" Seattle come off like Amish country.

But then, the city has been trying to prevent outward signs of civic wildness for years. The City Council last month banned certain beers and wines favored by the poor. The city has tried to ban posters on power poles—shot down in court in 2002—and when Mark Sidran was city attorney in 1993, he tried to impose no-sitting laws to sweep the homeless from city sidewalks.

And let's not forget the city's ridiculous All-Ages Dance Ordinance, which is meant to choke off the all-ages music scene, or the city's club task force, which many people in the club scene read as an attempt to hassle clubs for the 21-and-over crowd.

That is ridiculous. Sadly, that's what's happening all over.

Kid H.

Link via: The Agitator