Reason Ranks Chicago Last in Personal Freedom

by Sandy Ikeda
Fri, 1 Aug 2008 at 2:20 PM

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The Chicago Board of Aldermen recently removed its 2006 ban on foie gras on restaurant menus, one of the few victories for liberty in Chicago, which a new Reason magazine report describes as a "wet nurse of a city." Click here to read the report and see how the magazine ranks the other 34 biggest municipalities in the United States.

The latest trend in "nanny cities" across the country is permissiveness toward sex and drugs, but intolerance of alcohol, smoking, and fast foods:

Two decades of healthy economies and dropping crime rates have given many city councils the luxury of worrying about less urgent issues, from the last wisps of secondhand smoke to the discomfort of fatted geese. So even while self-styled progressives in Seattle, San Francisco, and Boston take a more relaxed approach to sex and pot, they've adopted increasingly restrictive laws regarding alcohol, tobacco, and junk food.

Not too surprisingly, Seattle and New York followed Chicago, but I didn't expect Portland, Oregon, which has one of the most irksome land-use regulations, to be one of the least restrictive (seventh) in personal freedom. (As long as everything's in its place, I suppose.)

Ranked the very least restrictive — no big surprise there — is Las Vegas.

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Although ranked 11th most restrictive in the Reason study, Los Angeles is doing its best to catch up to the big boys. The L.A. city council this week voted to impose a one-year moratorium on fast-food eateries in the neighborhood of South L.A. Here is the MSNBC article. Seems the council felt it had to do something to "encourage" citizens in this district to eat what in its opinion is a healthier diet.

An earlier version of this article quotes a spokesman for the California Restaurant Association as saying that fast food

"is the only industry that wants to be in South LA."... "Sit-down restaurants don't want to go in. If they did, they'd be there. This moratorium isn't going to help them relocate."

In the current version the following has been added:

"It's not where you eat, it's what you eat," said Andrew Pudzer, president and chief executive of CKE Restaurants, parent company of Carl's Jr. "We were willing to work with the city on that, but they obviously weren't interested."

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This made me think of an MSNBC article, "Man sheds 80 pounds on McDonald's diet," which appeared a few days ago:

A Virginia man lost about 80 pounds in six months by eating nearly every meal at McDonald's. Not Big Macs, french fries and chocolate shakes. Mostly salads, wraps and apple dippers without the caramel sauce.

I'm lovin'it!

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