TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Banning fast food in poor neighborhoods. – By William Saletan

I assumed this idea would go nowhere because we Americans don’t like government restrictions on what we eat. You can nag us. You can regulate what our kids eat in school. But you’ll get our burgers when you pry them from our cold, dead hands.

How did the L.A. City Council get around this resistance? By spinning the moratorium as a way to create more food choices, not fewer. And by depicting poor people, like children, as less capable of free choice.

There is a rather disturbing trend of government-as-paternalistic-overseer. Ban trans-fat, it’s bad! — ban fast food, it’s bad and they have no choice! Right.

What is even more amusing is the political left, ostensibly the protector of political freedom in their battle against Bush’s own encroachments, is where support and justification for this is coming from. Oppose one violation of the individual’s rights by government, and support three more violations is their slogan, apparently.

Even richer, many from the left who support banning trans-fat and fast food likely also support the legalization of drugs.

But it is the same logic which underlies both rights violations — that the government should make decisions for how we live because we cannot help ourselves. It is the belief that individuals cannot make a choice — this all-knowing, all-wise supra-body, the government, must make decisions for us lest we err.

Their mistake is in assuming political freedom is any different than the freedom to consume what I choose. It isn’t. Political freedom — the right to express my opinions and vote for whomever I please for office (however out of step my views are with the majority) — is predicated on a simple assumption. That assumption is that humans are sentient, rational, and individual beings which, therefore, are able to make choices for themselves.

The right to consume as I please is derived from this same assumption. I am an individual and can make choices as to what I consume, and if I make a bad decision, that is my error and my burden to hold. To violate my right to consume what I want is to say that government, not me, has the right to make decisions for me. It is to say that government knows better, and its decree is held paramount over my own rationality.

There is no reason, then, to say that I should be able to believe what I want, and vote for whomever I choose. If government makes better decisions than me, then its committees should choose its leaders and laws.

This is not just about banning certain bad fats or bad restaurants. This is about control.