Some Chicago public schools are now forbidding students from eating lunches brought from home.
Students must eat the lunches provided at the school cafeteria (at prices set by the government-run schools) or go hungry. The only waivers granted are for medical reasons -- such as a food allergy.
Of course, the restrictions on eating lunches packed at home is based on a new version of paternalism. The school system is saying that they know better what's healthy for the children than the parents.
Although not directly related to the national health care "reform", these petty school bureaucrats share the same mindset of wanting to restrict your freedoms, supposedly for noble purposes -- in this case "for the children".
I think I liked the old-style Chicago thuggery better, where they didn't pretend they were using force against you for your own good.
Or as Abraham Lincoln once said, "When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for example, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."
The blog of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM)
