Nanny government Getting the Important Things Done

In New York City you are protected from the hazards of 32 oz soft drinks, second hand smoke at the beach and in the park and trans-fats in your food, but the possibility of the tunnels and subways flooding during a storm does not seem to have been a concern of Mayor Bloomberg.

It's not as if the possibility has never been mentioned.  Via Meadia

The New York Times notes that scientists and flood experts have been warning about the risks of flooding in New York for years and have suggested everything from levees to floodgates in New York Harbor to minimize potential damage. Yet neither the city nor the state government has taken serious steps to act on these suggestions...

 Here in New York we have a very busy government. It’s worried about the kinds of fats we eat and the size of the soft drinks we buy, and there is no shortage of regulations affecting businesses, street vendors, and individuals. But in all this exciting fine tuning, nobody seems to have bothered to think about the much greater task of keeping floodwaters out of the subway system. Admittedly, getting public support and finding the money for flood protection would be hard, but it is exactly that kind of hard job that governments are supposed to do. Leadership is getting the important things done, not looking busy on secondary tasks while the real needs of the city go quietly unmet.

The problem with nanny state governance isn’t just that it’s intrusive. It isn’t just that it stifles business with over-regulation, and it isn’t just that it empowers busybodies and costs money. It’s that it distracts government from the really big jobs that it ought to be doing.

The problem is that people in government are NOT the best and the brightest.  That's why they always tackle the easy tasks and ignore the hard ones.  It really is easier to ban large sodas than to protect the subways and tunnels from flooding.  This is especially true in Liberal cities like New York where The People Who Matter would not be caught dead drinking soda pop, in either large containers or small. There is no opportunity for grandstanding in front of a flood gate that may not be used for decades.  So the residents of Gotham had a chance to see pictures of flood waters gushing into the subways and trucks submerged at the entrance of the tunnels leading into and out of the island.  Safe in Nanny Bloomer's embrace.