The difference

As many people are by now no doubt aware, Sen. Tom Coburn asked Elena Kagan during her confirmation hearing whether she believes a government law which mandates citizens to eat three fruits and vegetables every day violates the Constitution's Commerce Clause. Kagan evaded, instead simply averring that it sounded like a "dumb law."

Michael Tomasky comments on the exchange's larger significance:

I guess I wouldn't go so far as to say that the government should in fact be able to pass a law ordering that Americans eat three vegetables a day. On the other hand this is pretty much a classic argument about individual liberty vs. the common good that liberalism always loses in American culture but not necessarily in others.

If everyone ate three servings of vegetables a day, we'd be living in an improved society. Heart attacks and obesity would reduce, health-care costs would go down by the order of billions of dollars, American farmers would be making more money and on and on and on and on. The benefits would be vast.

But of course, to American conservatives, this would be fascism. Even something well short of this would be accused of being fascist, since after all Hitler liked vegetables, too.

To me it's like this. Any society is full of competing values and interests. Here, we have the value of individual liberty competing with the value of overall social health. I have big trouble taking seriously the idea that making fast-food joints post their nutritional information is fascism. However, I have a hard time seeing how any sane person could deny that a largely fast-food diet will kill a person.

Leaving aside Tomasky's inanity about Hitler and lethal fast-food diets, he does succeed in illustrating the stark difference between libertarians and advocates of big government. Libertarians care about personal freedom, whereas the political left professes to be more concerned about the well-being of the collective. While libertarians couldn't care less if someone chooses to eat hamburgers for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the left obsesses over such matters, as they want to share their enlightened views with everyone -- more organic food and public broadcasting, less McDonald's and Jerry Springer -- by government force if necessary (kind of like Spanish missionaries).

They simply can't help themselves. Armed with a stunning amount of hubris, their goal is nothing less than remaking society in their image. The fact that their top-down schemes hatched by a learned few invariably fail is but a minor inconvenience, for all that really matters is the purity of their motives. In contrast, libertarians are content to let people live their lives as they see fit, finding their own way towards achieving happiness. It's worth noting that while a leftist can live their life as they wish under a libertarian regime -- perhaps for example founding a commune in which every person would eat three servings of fruits and vegetables -- the reverse is not true, as the libertarian must conform to the leftists' desires.

It's instances like this that remind me of how deeply unfair it is that the political left has usurped the term "liberal," a word which connotes free-thinking, generosity and tolerance. The liberal ideology as we understand it, however, possesses none of these traits. Liberals want to be in charge of as much of your life as possible, exerting maximum control over they money you make, how you behave and what you think. Why? Because of their supreme belief in their intelligence and determination to impose their superior ways on the benighted masses.

Tomasky concludes:

It'd be nice if conservatives showed an ounce of interest in this problem, instead of acting as if a person's right to live on triple bacon-cheeseburgers is as inalienable as free speech. And it's interesting once again that McDonald's and Wendy's and the rest are not just junk-food purveyors but also major international corporations and the GOP just happens to be on their side.

Leaving aside whether a fast-food diet is a collective problem to be collectively solved, I absolutely believe that one's right to eat whatever they want ranks up alongside free speech (and since when did the left, advocates of speech codes and legislation such as the fairness doctrine, care about free speech anyway?). When citizens can no longer exert control over something so basic as to what forms of nourishment to ingest in their own bodies, can they truly still be called free people?