City Of Cambridge Considers Soda Ban in Restaurants: Approve?

Please note Katherine and Lester aren't the same person. I generally agree with Katherine though.

Also note that my initial post had to do with the rights of the local community and was not an attempt to distinguish between elected officials and the general population. So I wasn't actually contradicting myself, because in my initial post it was implicit that "have a right" meant "have a right through their representatives." I didn't make that explicit because that wasn't the point I was addressing.

Our disagreement seems to be over what people should vote on themselves and what their representatives should vote on. Katherine is right that we live in a republic not a direct democracy, so most laws are passed by representatives. I would guess that no more than 1 out of every 10,000 laws in most communities come about by direct vote. No one seems to be arguing that the Cambridge city council doesn't have the authority to do this. If this sort of thing isn't what the people of Cambridge want their officials deciding, I imagine they could amend their city charter to make that explicit (although I have no idea how you would phrase such a restriction.) Also, if they don't like the law that is passed, there is likely some initiative method they could use to rescind it, or they could always vote in new council members.

I agree with most of the people on this thread that such a law would likely be ineffectual. However I strongly disagree that what laws a community should have should be based on speculation that the community's views mirror SodaHead. The normal legislative process should be followed (which appears to be what is happening in Cambridge), and if a mistake is made (which I think is fairly unlikely because local politician generally aren't going to vote to get themselves into trouble), there are multiple ways that it can be corrected.