I’m sorry to disturb you — I don’t mean to be a bother. I realize that at this hour of the day, some of you are not even fully awake yet, and may God help you if mine is the first face you should see. But considering you have been standing here for how long now — two hours? three? — it has become clear to me that you might crave something other than a deep-fried delicacy, which you could get for a dollar right around the corner there in under a minute. I am not here to judge you. In fact, I’d like to help you, if you’d permit me these few small words.

We all know New York’s culinary landscape is storied and fecund. For years, it has brimmed with a surfeit of toothsome morsels: cupcakes and cookies, macaroons and macarons. We are the sons and daughters of a free market spurred by competition, and that is what has made our lives rich and full. Another baker’s success does not detract from my own, nor do I wish to profit from another man’s plight.

But for too many months now, Dominique Ansel has inveigled us into suffering long lines and extortionate prices. In filling our stomachs with cronuts, we have been lulled into a doughy haze of unfeeling and unthinking. We eat, but we are not full. We pay, but we are not protected.

And it is in so doing that we are made complicit in these interlocking systems of oppression. When we pay his prices, we affirm their validity. When we accept his two-cronut limit per person, we fuel his monopoly. Our greed for social currency has divested us from the things that truly enrich us, and we have let our minds shrink from reason and our hearts sink with hydrogenated fat.

But I say, do not let yourselves be browbeaten and Bloomberged into one’s man prescriptive for how to live your lives — telling you when to wait and what to pay and how to eat! You are not lemmings! You are not puppets! You are consumers! You are a free people with the love of American capitalism in your hearts. Purchasing power shall be dictated not by one man with an invisible hand or even a few select men with conspicuous hands, but a whole economy of men — by you, the people!

Your wallets are the source of our nation’s strength — use them for good! Cast not your vote for tyranny! Vote for liberty! And in the name of confectionery, let us all unite!