You may recall that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors banned McDonalds from giving away toys with their Happy Meals. This is because the BOS, good government nannies all, had decided that all those unlicensed parents were just too incompetent to keep their children away from the predations of an eeeeevil corprayshun like McDonalds. So, McDonalds is now charging ten cents extra for the toy, much to the flummoxment of nanny state proggs.
Okay, a number of things are at work here. Proggs feel themselves to be shouldered with the responsibility to run everyone else's affairs. Since proggs disapprove of commerce, feeling that everyone should really be knitting Mexican wedding shirts on some hippie commune instead, successful companies offend them. And since proggs believe that they are endowed with the wisdom to build, craft, plan, construct the perfect Erewhon society of the future, the natural, organically evolved society they live in also offends them. Also, as the general population gradually becomes accustomed to the idea that government should take over individual responsibilities, the government naturally looks for ways to both extend and entrench itself in this new role, and also to make its job easier. The more money government has to spend forcing people to get healthy, the less there is for other purposes. And there is also the psychological phenomenon known as transference. As California's astronomical debt burden crushes the state flat, acivists and the government avoids the problem by screaming louder and louder about trifles such as Happy Meals.
Kudos to McDonalds for not knuckling under. Let them be yet one more business chased out of California, rather than bow to these self-impressed social saviors.
