Listen up, New Yorkers: Your local government is here to educate you about the dangers of listening to your iPod too loud. Whatever would you do without them? The NY Post reports:

Mayor Bloomberg — who has already cracked down on smoking, junk food, trans fats, salt and super-sized drinks — is embarking on a new crusade: preventing New Yorkers from going deaf.

Hizzoner’s health officials are planning a social-media campaign to warn young people about the risk of losing their hearing from listening to music at high volume on personal MP3 players, The Post has learned.

“With public and private support, a public-education campaign is being developed to raise awareness about safe use of personal music players . . . and risks of loud and long listening,” said Nancy Clark, the city Health Department’s assistant commissioner of environmental-disease prevention.

The campaign, which will cost $250,000, is being financed through a grant received from the Fund for Public Health, the Health Department’s fund-raising arm.

No laws or regulations or anything in the works for this one (for now), it’s more in the way of a public-awareness campaign, but come on. There are a billion and one different things in this world that are hazardous to our health — is it really any government’s job to try and save us from ourselves on every single one of them, especially when it means that there are government employees being paid with tax dollars whose jobs are even partially dedicated to that kind of thing. Mayor Bloomberg has managed to double New York City’s debt to $110 billion in a decade (and according to him, this is with the federal government providing for 10-12 percent of the city’s budget), but it certainly sounds like there are a few bureaucrats they can afford to shave off…

I suppose this is local government, and New Yorkers keep on voting for the guy; if these are the type of functions the city’s voters really want, then that’s that — but why they do will never cease to baffle me.