‘Government should not tell you what to do unless there’s a compelling public purpose,’ declares…

Mayor Bloomberg, re: gay “marriage.”

See, he knows people who are gay.

But he doesn’t know anybody who smokes.

So there you have it:

The liberal values compass in a nutshell.

As I’ve argued at Facebook etc all week with so-called “libertarians” (who’ve evidently developed this strange new respect for The Government):

If your reason for supporting gay “marriage” is, “I know a lot of gay people,” then just say so.

Be honest about how shallow your principles are: that they wax and wane depending on who you accidentally happen to be related to or work with this week.

But please spare me the unedifying spectacle of you reverse engineering your principles to match your happenstance personal relationships, haughtily throwing around words like “rights” and “the State,” THEN bitching at me for not agreeing with you (and pointing out how shallow you’re being.)

UPDATE — David Harsanyi writes:

Remember, Bloomberg’s believes that it’s his job to save “tens of thousands of lives” by cutting your intake of sodium.

And those New York anarchists who want to run gourmet food trucks, salt or no salt, can only do so after attaining a “Food Protection Certificate” and a “Sales Tax Certificate of Authority” and then, if they’re lucky, a “Mobile Food Vendor” permit. Public purpose.

Not that they could afford to drive those trucks. We must, according to Mike, be “raising the [gas] tax and encouraging people to reduce consumption. The anti-tax people don’t like that. But using capitalism to encourage the right behavior is exactly the [right] direction of going. Tax policy is the way government uses capitalism.”

This is just a tiny sampling of the autocratic instincts of of Mr. Bloomberg.