Today’s Most infuriating Quote

Via Dwight comes a link to this Jonathan Chait piece in New York magazine. Which contained this gem of prevarication:

Bloomberg’s health crusade is so unusual because it embraces a political mode usually associated with the right. Conservatives favor regulation of vice and personal behavior, especially related to sex, because they believe that the state has a legitimate role in shaping the culture. Traditional social values, they believe, undergird stable families and a well-functioning community. Liberals traditionally want to remove the government from regulating personal behavior and to deploy it only in the economic realm.

That quote might have had some nodding relationship to reality in, oh, 1980 or so. But it’s certainly not conservatives who have been pushing to:

  • Ban civilian firearms ownership
  • Increase tobacco taxes
  • Ban incandescent light bulbs
  • Force Catholics to pay for abortions
  • Ban “high flow” toilets
  • Ban “hate speech”
  • Ban plastic bags
  • Ban transfats
  • Ban crosses and managers on public land
  • Ban liquor stores in black neighborhoods
  • Ban talk radio
  • Ban government use of the word “Christmas”
  • Ban SUVs, or any other vehicle that get insufficiently “virtuous” gas mileage
  • Ban genetically modified foods
  • Ban foie gras
  • And don’t forget that the “War on Drugs” was an extremely bipartisan affair, with Hubert Humphrey, Joe Biden and Tip O’Neil all among its enthusiastic backers.
  • Etc.
  • This poster makes many of the same points:

    The idea that modern (as opposed to classical) liberals “want to remove the government from regulating personal behavior” is a naked, vainglorious, self-flattering lie on Chait’s part, and only someone living in the coastal Liberal Reality Bubble could possibly type it with a straight face.

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