RUSH: I want to move on to one of the craziest stories of the day. There are two of them here. They are out of San Francisco. And the first one has to do with eating. There’s a new law in the works in San Francisco that is taking aim at tech companies. The proposed law would ban businesses from having employee cafeterias.

Now, this is not just San Francisco. This is gonna extend down the bay into Silicon Valley eventually. You go to places like Google and Apple in buildings with 10 to 14,000 employees, it just doesn’t make any sense for all those people to leave the building for a half hour or an hour, go out and grab lunch whenever their lunch hour is and then come back. So they have cafeterias. They have had for the longest time. And they’re subsidized. It actually is an employee perk. Many of these places you eat lunch for free, and if you’re there overnight, you eat dinner.

They’re full-fledged restaurant operations that these companies maintain and run. The fear is that neighborhood restaurants and restaurants in towns and nearby cities are losing money and in danger of going out of business because so many tech employees are not stopping in. The law is intended to force employee companies like Twitter, Facebook, Uber, Google, Apple, to go out for lunch in order to help local restaurants. They’re complaining they can’t compete with the cafeterias in these businesses.

Now, keep in mind, we live in a free country. And just like the story we had yesterday about how difficult it is to leave a high-income-tax state for a no-income-tax state, the same thing is happening here. The problem is the tech companies don’t charge their employees for meals. Food is a perk.

The proposed law here has the backing of the Golden Gate restaurant association. The executive director says they can’t compete with free. Really? Somebody in the Bay Area is seeing the light! They can’t compete with free! This has been a major problem the Republican Party has had over the years. It can’t compete with free, either.

And that’s what the Democrat Party is. They’re Santa Claus. They promise to give everything away to anybody who wants it, including now income! The Democrat Party is advocating guaranteed universal income! We don’t have the money for any of this! But they’re talking about it, and guess who supposedly is signing on to this and loving it.

Yes. That’s right. Your Millennial kids think that guaranteed universal income is one of the greatest ideas they have ever heard. So if these liberal lawmakers get their way in San Francisco, thousands of their liberal voters, employees of liberal tech companies, will have to step over piles of human poop on San Francisco streets or step over piles of used syringes and needles, they have to run the risk of getting mugged or worse, and then dig into their own pockets to pay for food that they used to get for free. This may be the first time in recorded history liberal politicians have gone on record against the concept of a free lunch. And it’s happening in San Francisco!

Now, the second thing happening in San Francisco. Up to six months in jail for giving people straws. It’s no longer a felony in California or San Francisco to knowingly pass on HIV, but it is now punishable up to six months in jail for a waiter to give a patron in a restaurant a straw.

“The city of Santa Barbara has passed an ordinance that will allow restaurant employees to be punished with up to six months of jail time or a $1,000 fine for giving plastic straws to their customers. The bill was passed unanimously last Tuesday, and covers bars, restaurants, and other food-service businesses. Establishments will still be allowed to hand out plastic stirrers, but only if customers request them.”

Oh. And there’s this. Each individual straw counts as a separate infraction, which means that if somebody got busted handing out straws to a table of four people, he or she could end up facing years behind bars. Now, straws represent, best calculation 0.02% of the amount of plastic waste estimated to go into the ocean every year. Stop and think of the thinking that goes behind this, the banning of plastic straws. It’s an environmental thing.

In the meantime, as I said earlier, you will continue to find piles of human feces all over San Francisco streets. You will continue to find used hypodermic needles all over San Francisco streets. You will trip over the homeless responsible for the filth and the debris, but soon you will not find plastic straws or coffee stirrers on the streets of San Francisco. And this is called progress. It’s people drinking coffee with plastic stirrers and straws on their way to work that are the problem.

Now, I have so many questions about this. If the illegal plastic straw is then used for a sugary drink, like iced tea, could that earn an even bigger fine? For example, let’s say an illegal immigrant in a sanctuary city uses a plastic straw to fire spitballs at an ICE agent, what happens? Is there an exemption?

Is there an exemption from the law if an illegal grabs a plastic straw and fires a spitball at an ICE agent? Would that be applauded? Would that grant you exemption from this law? There are gonna have to be modifications going forward because clearly you and I can come up with legitimate uses for plastic straws that people in San Francisco would applaud.

What if the illegal immigrant uses a plastic straw to fire a spitball at a Trump supporter? I mean, they would want to give that person the key to the city, but the law says it could be a thousand-dollar fine and maybe even jail time. So before it’s all over, it may end up being a question of how straws are used and who is using them before it’s all said and done.

So, once again the liberals have crafted a stupid, dumb law that is gonna have to be revised with exceptions made. And they are dead serious. I’m not kidding. There are maps that show you where piles of human feces are so that you can avoid them, but don’t you dare be caught accepting a plastic straw from a waiter anywhere.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  I can’t wait for the first protests against the straw ban out in California.  “Equal protection under the straw!”  I can just see the signs now and the slogans.  Let me get started on the phones.  David in San Francisco.  Great to have you with us.  You’re up first today.  Hello.

CALLER: (garbled cell) Hi, Rush.  Just a quick comment that I think everybody will find laughable about this law of the cafes and the companies.  There are actually more seats in restaurants in San Francisco than there are citizens, than there are residents of San Francisco.

RUSH:  Is that right?

CALLER: Yes. (laughing)

RUSH: There are more seats in restaurants in San Francisco than the population of the city?

CALLER:  Yeah.  Our restaurants are in no danger of going under.  It’s ludicrous.  It’s people wanting to make laws, thinking that laws make a society civil.  It’s nuts.

RUSH:  No, that’s not… Well, yeah, okay.  But it’s worse than that.  Look, we’re talking about liberals.  Let’s be honest. San Francisco.  I mean, there are conservatives that he live there.  We have actually a very large audience in San Francisco.  We have all the conservatives; it’s a sizable number of people.  But the vast majority of people there are liberals.  What is this?  What is this really?  And look at this straw business too.  Look at what liberals think power is for.  It is to tell people how to live.

It is to be able to punish people who don’t live the way you want them to.  Who are these people to even suggest that the problem is these cafeterias at all of these major firms, tech firms and otherwise?  So the solution here is not competition, because they think they can’t compete with free.  No, the solution here is to make these businesses shut down the cafeterias, to actually get the power of the state — in this case, probably a city government, and maybe even county — to start dictating to these businesses how they must run.

“In order to protect the investments of people in the restaurant business, you must shut down the company cafeteria, the company mess.”  Now, I think this is a great illustration of the liberal mind at work and how it seeks to use power, and it also is a great illustration of the hypocrisy here.  This is all supposed to be utopia.  This isn’t supposed to happen, right?  Nobody is supposed to be engaging in things for self-interest.  No!  Everybody’s supposed to be doing everything for the common good.

I mean, that’s what utopia is.

So these tech companies… You know, this is not the only transgression.  You know what else the tech companies do?  They actually have buses, they have buses that go pick up their employees and take them to work and then take them home.  And these are big, luxurious, coach kinds of buses.  This is ticking off the neighborhoods where these employees live, ’cause they got these buses coming in there to pick ’em up.  And this is enabling people to buy and rent more expensive properties since they don’t have to pay for their transportation, and the neighborhoods are upset that the companies are finding efficient ways to get their employees to and from work.

There just isn’t any love or happiness out there, and it’s amazing.