Global elites think you’re too stupid for soda and beer
The latest wheeze from global public health elites? Jack up taxes on tobacco, alcohol, sugary drinks, and processed food by 50% to raise $3.7 trillion in new revenue. They call it “health policy.” In plain English, it’s government-sanctioned theft.
This isn’t about curing disease. It’s about expanding state power. These so-called health taxes, pushed by academic ideologues and international bureaucrats, are little more than economic punishment disguised as progress. They won’t meaningfully reduce illness, but they’ll absolutely hit working people the hardest.
Sin taxes don’t foster well-being — they weaponize economic pain against the people who can least afford it.
The new push for massive taxes on soda, smokes, beer, and snacks is social engineering with a hefty price tag. The goal isn’t better health so much as behavioral compliance. And who pays for it? Not corporations. Not policymakers. Regular people. Especially those already stretched thin.
The promise of $3.7 trillion in new revenue tells you everything you need to know. This is about cash, not caring. You’re not going to fix the obesity crisis by making a Coke cost $4. You’re just making life worse for the guy who wants a cold drink after work.
These aren’t just products. They’re small pleasures — a beer at dinner, a smoke on break, a soda on a hot afternoon. Legal, affordable, familiar. Stripping them from people’s lives in the name of “health” doesn’t uplift anyone. It makes life more miserable.
And this plan doesn’t educate or empower. It punishes. It uses taxes to bludgeon people into compliance. That’s not public health — that’s moral authoritarianism.
Proponents claim that higher prices discourage consumption, especially among young people. But that’s not smart policy — it’s an admission that the entire strategy relies on pricing people out of their own choices.
That’s not a sign of sound policy; it’s a confession that the aim is to price people out of their own choices. It’s hard not to see this as profoundly elitist. A worldview in which an ignorant public must be nudged, coerced, and taxed into making decisions deemed acceptable by a distant class of arrogant policymakers.
Sin taxes don’t foster well-being — they weaponize economic pain against the people who can least afford it. The more someone spends on a drink or a cigarette, the less they can spend on rent, groceries, or gas. In the U.K., economists found that sin taxes cost low-income families up to 10 times more than they cost the wealthy. That holds true in the United States as well. These are regressive by design.
History offers a warning. Prohibition didn’t end drinking — it empowered criminals. Today, in places like Australia, black markets for vapes and other restricted products are booming. When governments overregulate, people continue to consume. They just go underground, and quality, safety, and accountability go with them.
Public health bureaucrats love to talk about the “commercial determinants of health,” blaming industry for every social ill. But they ignore the personal determinants that matter even more: freedom, dignity, and the right to make informed decisions.
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People already know the risks of smoking, drinking, and sugar consumption. They’ve seen the labels and heard the warnings for years. They don’t need lectures from bureaucrats, government ministers, or international agencies. What they need is respect — and the freedom to live as they choose.
These new tax schemes don’t offer support or alternatives. They rely on coercion, not persuasion. The state becomes the enforcer, not the helper. It’s a government model that punishes pleasure and equates restriction with virtue.
The sinister core of this health tax agenda lies in its relentless condescension. It assumes people are too stupid, too reckless, or too addicted to choose what’s best for themselves, and so government must intervene forcefully and repeatedly.
This is control, not compassionate governance.
A better path exists — one rooted in harm reduction, not prohibition. Encourage low-sugar drink options. Expand access to safer nicotine alternatives. Support moderate alcohol consumption. Respect the people you’re trying to help.
If public health advocates truly want to improve outcomes, they should abandon these regressive, punitive proposals. They should promote innovation, not punishment. Education, not enforcement.
Because real public health doesn’t treat people like problems to be managed. It treats them like citizens — free to live, choose, and thrive.
www.theblaze.com
Zohran Mamdani: NYC's pimp mayor
My friend and journalist Ben Kawaller went cruising the streets of Manhattan for "sex workers."
To talk to. Just to talk.
You can tell that Mamdani truly believes that sex work is work, because, like actual work, you can’t find any on his resume.
In a video filmed for the New York Post, Ben gets a stripper, an OnlyFans model, and some hookers — see, there’s a spectrum of sex work — on camera to give their thoughts on mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s support for the decriminalization of sex work. (Stripping 'round the pole and on screen are already legal, so what we’re really talking about is decriminalizing prostitution.)
The video is worth the watch, but if you don’t have two minutes and 52 seconds to spare, spoiler alert: The sex workers Ben spoke to will be voting for Mamdani.
No Cuomo
I don’t know how many members of the skin trade are registered to vote in the five boroughs or what their johns will do at the polls — like, are you allowed to vote against your dominatrix? — but it doesn’t bode well for Andrew Cuomo’s mayoral campaign.
Cuomo can take off his shoes in every mosque in the city and attempt to publicly shame Mamdani for holding supposedly contradictory fundamental beliefs in Islam and the “fundamental belief that sex work is work,” but I don’t think it’s going to harm Cuomo’s 33-year-old opponent.
When it comes to delivering this message of hypocrisy to the faithful, Cuomo is no Angel Jibrīl. No, Andrew is a heavily flawed politician, who looks like a successful funeral director who decides to open a diner.
Forget the blood he has on his hands from the COVID years. On the issue of sex work, Cuomo is the New York governor who “signed a repeal of a prostitution loitering law,” which made it easier for streetwalkers to set up shop on the corner than hotdog vendors.
What’s ironic is that while Cuomo never paid with money for his scandals of inappropriate touching, he paid big-time with his career. And unfortunately, New Yorkers are going to pay an even bigger price when their city is under the control of Mamdani, the comically “African-American" chic communist who wants to seize the means of production and pimp the most productive members of society like cheap whores.
Collectivist 'em all
I’m not the one to make an argument for or against sex work, but I am the one to imagine Mamdani’s future New York City, where sex work is legalized and his collectivist policies are written into law.
Let’s be honest: The goal of decriminalization is eventual legalization — just like the goal of socialism is communism. Mamdani might call himself a Democratic Socialist on "The View" — and the ladies are dumb enough to fall for the rebranding — but we all know that Democratic Socialism is simply socialism on Lupron.
You can tell that Mamdani truly believes that sex work is work, because, like actual work, you can’t find any on his resume. Now while I don’t see him joining any brothel co-ops, decriminalization will lead to more taxpayers for the government to squeeze, and thanks to the world’s oldest profession, no one will have an excuse to be unemployed. If you have a body — in whatever condition it’s in — no doubt there’s a freaky customer out there for you.
But with all the new sex workers, competition will be tight (or loose?), so I see sex work becoming yet another genital in the gig economy. In addition to migrants zipping down avenues on e-bikes for UberEats, you’ll now have them delivering flesh takeout against traffic. Just think what this will mean for congestion pricing!
RELATED: Socialist Mamdani’s $65M plan to turn NYC into ‘gender-affirming’ sanctuary for ‘transgender youth’
Breast equity
But the expanded tax base could help fund Mamdani’s promise to provide $65 million in funding for gender-affirming care. That means prostitutes of all gender identities can get the bodies they need to better serve the public. But to maintain NYC's breast equity, top surgeries and breast implants will have to balance out.
Phasing out the city’s gifted-and-talented programs in government schools is going to hurt public education, and replacing the school-to-prison pipeline with a school-to-whorehouse pipeline is going to make for some awkward conversations between educators and students.
Imagine being a high-school guidance counselor having to break the news to a student, “You don’t have the grades for college or the work ethic for trade school — but there’s always the corner.”
The barriers to entry are low to nonexistent in sex work. For now. But when the state seizes the means of reproduction, licensing will ultimately follow, and in order to combat corporate greed, there will need to be price controls. Your body, your choice — except when it comes to price-gouging.
Laid off
Until Mamdani decommodifies housing, you’ll be able to exchange sex for rent, right? But the specifics will have to be ironed out to protect tenants’ rights. No one wants to be evicted from their home because a landlord snuck a kissing clause into the lease.
The first time I heard “sex work is work” was in a sex-and-gender studies class I took as an undergrad at NYU. Supporting sex work between consenting adults has been the hip stance to take. But any time I offered minimum wage to a date sympathetic to the cause, she’d get offended. Even though I agreed to pay for the full hour — even if I didn’t use it all.
I also learned that marriage is a form of sex work — which I didn't stop believing until I actually got married. In short: There are so many things I put up with with my wife that I would never put up with a ho. Neither a pimp nor a john I be. Plus, no guy has ever thought, “I really want to get this hooker pregnant!”
My family and I no longer live in New York, but I come in often to work. It’s an expensive commute, and I may need to take on a side hustle to afford it. As the saying Karl Marx popularized goes, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
If sex work is work, then the same applies. And under Mayor Mamdani, everyone is f**ked.