What Libertarians (Often) Miss About “Free Choice” and Markets
There’s a lot to like about libertarianism. The idea that people should, in general, be left alone to make their own decisions and control their own destinies is a righteous and important one. But there’s a narrowness of focus in a lot of libertarian argumentation that I find incredibly frustrating.
Take this piece from the libertarian magazine Reason. In it, Steve Chapman claims that by regulating Happy Meals and trying to tax soda, politicians in San Francisco and New York are acting as “food police” — telling us what we can and can’t eat.
The reality is, though, that none of the politicians Chapman slams are trying to ban anything. The San Francisco law doesn’t stop parents from buying their kids fries or burgers, it just regulates which foods can be bundled with toys. And the New York proposal wouldn’t halt sales of sodas, it’d just tax them a bit more.
In today’s United States, attempts to actually ban products on moral grounds are thankfully quite rare. But by framing regulatory schemes like these as contests between free choice and state nannyism, libertarians often obscure the real dynamics at play in business-consumer relationships, and let insidious governmental acts off the hook.
Consider, for example, the recent New York Times exposé of the federal government’s role in promoting the sale
