Another Liberal Effort to “Save Us from Ourselves”

Have we figured it out yet — that there is no inherent brake on the interventionist impulse, once we accede to the principle?

All those old curmudgeons were right. They were shouted down and pooh-poohed, back in the 1930s, the ’40s, the ’50s, the ’60s, the ’70s, the ’80s, and the ’90s.

“How absurd!” people said of their arguments and concerns. “Why would giving the government a little power to regulate the things I want regulated turn America into a tyranny? Take a powder, curmudgeons and doomsayers! Get back on your meds!”

And here it is. The day of banning salt in resataurant food has come. To anyone who thinks government won’t try to ban (or, more ingeniously, limit and regulate) the cylinder of Morton’s Salt in your home: You’re the fool. Shut up and sit down. You’ve done more than enough damage.

J.E. Dyer on March 20, 2010 at 11:12 AM

HP — agreed, but it started well before Obama. We’ve been on this train for decades.

Back in the 1930s, when they started teaching about the “four food groups” in some American schools, and then it began spreading across the nation, there were people who pointed out that schooling the people in “nutrition” was a practice imported from Nazi Germany. (Which it was.) Eventually it became a mandate in all the states, and the US Department of Agriculture prepared materials for the lesson plans. Then HEW, then its successor HHS got into the act.

The critics predicted that what we chartered the government to teach us about today we’d be regulated on tomorrow. After all, we were letting government regulate more and more things as the years went by. People shrugged and said that was absurd. How could government regulate what we eat?

When the employer mandate to offer health insurance was instituted, and when Medicare was adopted, and then Medicaid, critics predicted that one day it would be argued that government had to step in and tell people what to eat, because now we were all collectively on the hook for the cost of each other’s medical care.

This was more than 50 years ago, when critics of collectivization schemes were pointing these things out. It was all foreseeable. The people who did foresee it at the time were excoriated by the left (which is always the faction urging these forms of government intervention), and dismissed by the average, centrist-conservative voter as cranks.

But they were right.

J.E. Dyer on March 20, 2010 at 11:47 AM