Accountability

Friday 27 January 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized

When government has a monopoly over deciding who is an isn’t accountable, we all lose. Cato @ Liberty:

[The health nannies in New York City are blatantly creating false advertising] again. On January 9, Gotham’s for-your-own-good crew unveiled a new ad warning “Portions have grown. So has Type 2 diabetes, which can lead to amputations,” dramatically illustrated with a photo of an obese man with a stump where his leg had been. But as the New York Times reports, city officials “did not let on that the man shown — whose photo came from a company that supplies stock images to advertising firms and others — was not an amputee and may not have had diabetes.” Instead, they just Photoshopped his leg off, which certainly got the effect they were looking for, albeit at the cost of photographic reality. At an agency developing an ad campaign for a private company, someone might have advised adding a little fine print taking note that the picture was of a model and had been altered, lest the manipulation turn into the story itself, or even attract the interest of federal truth-in-advertising regulators. But the Bloomberg crew probably isn’t worried about the latter, given that their constant stream of hectic propaganda is fueled by generous grants from the federal government itself.

When government is not held to the same standards as the private sphere, the rule of law means little. Money from the taxpayers of New York City is being stolen in order to advance a questionable agenda that uses blatant false advertising. How there will be no accountability in this case is disturbing.

2012-01-27  »  madlibertarianguy