“If you see someone coming toward you with the object of doing you good, run for your life.”

— Henry David Thoreau

It always starts benign, cloaked in good intentions. “We’re doing it for the children,” they say, or for the “victims” of unscrupulous operators. Yet what it amounts to is a naked power grab, premised on the condition that someone else knows how to run your life better than you do.

What is this insidious form of slow tyranny? Social engineering — and it’s closer to home than you may realize.

Consider first the most obvious case, the now-infamous ban on “all-you-can-drink” specials in Ames. Examine the way it was put forth, from the perspective that bar patrons are “victims” of sinister bar owners who lure students in and then cause them to binge drink in order to recoup the sunk cost of paying a high cover. Never mind that said patrons come in with the premeditated goal of doing just that — obtaining large quantities of alcohol at a low price. If they can’t do it at a bar, they’ll do it somewhere else.

Of course, Ames’ homegrown tyrants are well aware of this basic economic fact, which is why now they’re pushing for an even more restrictive drink specials ordinance that raises the tax on beer and bans cheap drink specials like penny pitchers, an incarnation of the ordinance that failed when it originally came into being.

One of the chief advocates of both bans (and many other implements of social control) is Ames Youth and Shelter Services director George Belitsos. He makes the ban a question of “overconsumption,” arguing the availability of cheap alcohol makes binge drinking an inevitable conclusion.

Yet such a statement is premised on the idea that individuals are too irresponsible to account for their own actions, thus having need of coercion by our benevolent despots in order to make “proper life choices.” The assumption that such a “for your own good” mentality rests upon, however, is that somehow, an educated elite knows how to run your own life “better” than you — that because you are incapable of making proper choices — you should have such choices made for you, or, at the very least, be gently prodded in that direction.

The trap of such thinking manages to snare people not normally so hostile to individual liberty. After all, it can be agreed that certain behaviors are destructive, they say. Yet to go from simply acknowledging unhealthy behavior to legislating less destructive lifestyles crosses the line into making choices for others.

By endorsing social engineering, one inherently puts out a mandate that says, “Yes, I do know how to live your life better than you; make the choices I approve of, or you’ll pay the price.”

Can anyone who endorses such rhetoric even pretend to claim to believe in individual autonomy while keeping a straight face?

Yet such blatant assaults on free choice don’t stop at the city level. Right now, a bill is in the state House to levy a 25 percent excise tax on pornographic materials. The bill’s author makes no bones about his intentions — it’s an outright cash grab, preying upon a constituency he has little regard for.

In the Feb. 25 Daily, he was quoted as saying, “[My wife and I] went in [to an adult bookstore] and looked it over and saw how much money they made. We were only there for 20 minutes or so, but they took in a lot of revenue in that time.” His indifference to the tax’s effect on adult-oriented merchants and their patrons couldn’t make his agenda more clear: “I think they can afford it.”

Translation — we’ll make a mint off your sin.

It doesn’t stop with booze and porn. One of the oldest sin taxes outside of alcohol has been tobacco, always under the twin motives of “discouraging” a habit proponents don’t like while making a fast buck off users in the process.

Even now the governor proposes raising tobacco taxes — and one could find no more ringing endorsement than from the Daily’s own editorial board, a group not normally so hostile to individual choice, justified under the very same banner of public health and shaking down smokers (always an easy target) for extra cash.

In the end, the social tyrants win the right to rule your life not because of any justness to their cause, but because of a failure on the part of individuals to act out in resistance. And so long as the social engineers are allowed their way to govern your life, less choice will inevitably be the result.