Over at Crooked Timber, Belle Waring fights the good fight against dumb proposals aimed at zoning fast food restaurants out of urban neighborhoods. After pointing out why these types of polciies don’t work and why they restrict personal freedom, commenter “luc” responds:

Silly rules with good intentions are way better than disgusting libertarian market tropes about choice.

Wow. So the measure of a policy ought to be its “intentions,” no its results? And even paternalist laws with bad results are preferable to letting people make their own decisions? How goddamned depressing that people actually think like this.

Waring touches on what I’ve been saying for some time. If, as the public health activists suggest, the problem is that low-income people don’t have access to cheap, fresh produce, the answer is to allow into urban areas businesses that have figured out how to deliver fresh produce to low income people. And no one has that business model down better than Wal-Mart. What’s fun is watching the generally socialist public health crowd squirm when you point this out to them. I don’t have philosophical objections to community farmer’s markets. But it’s delusional to think they’re capable of putting good food in the homes of poor people on any significant scale. If access to fresh, unprocessed food is your concern, I hate to tell ya’, but you’re going to have to embrace a little capitalism.

I think it’s also important to point out the condescending, classist position one has to adopt in order support these types of policies. The argument, basically, is that poor people don’t know what’s best for them. They are incapable of making their own decisions about what they eat, and what they feed their kids. They’re mentally weak, and overly succeptible to advertising. Therefore, all-knowing public health activists ought to be able to right laws that make these types of decisions for poor people. Or, put another way, “poor people don’t eat artichokes.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 at 10:05 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.