No, yer honor, your job is to manage the city government, to make sure the snow gets shoveled and the trash gets picked up, not to lecture the rest of us and use the power of City Hall to impose your particular life-style choices on everybody else. But that’s what happens when conservatives let the Left seize the narrative and promote governmental mission creep. Once government “addresses” a problem by throwing taxpayer money at it, it’s only a short hop to government claiming — as Bloomberg does in the clip — that because government spends money on a “problem,” it now has the right to dictate personal behavior. Sheer genius, really.

By now, the notion that government from the feds on down has the “right” to interfere in every aspect of American life is well-established and nearly unquestioned. Two generations of red-diaper babies have grown up with visions of the Frankfurt School dancing in their heads; they’ve adapted Marxist tactics to the capitalist system in the furtherance of their world-view — George Soros, take a bow — but their goal remains the same: power, disguised as “compassion.”

The collapse of free societies doesn’t start with the Vandals’ assault on the gates of Rome. It starts with “reasonable” restrictions on freedom, “carve-outs” and “exemptions” to constitutional principles, “temporary” taxes and suspensions of civil liberties — all designed to inure the public to the destruction of bedrock guarantees ( i.e. “Congress shall make no law…”) in the name of what’s good for them.