Hawk Loc: Washington DC

Sarah Conly's editorial "Three Cheers for the Nanny State" (url http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/opinion/three-cheers-for-the-nanny-state.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) is chilling. She is writing about Mayor Blumberg’s ban on 32oz sodas. Her basic argument, an amplification of Mayor Blumberg's statement that sometimes government knows best, is that "A lot of times we have a good idea of where we want to go, but a really terrible idea of how to get there. It’s well established by now that we often don’t think very clearly when it comes to choosing the best means to attain our ends. We make errors. This has been the object of an enormous amount of study over the past few decades, and what has been discovered is that we are all prone to identifiable and predictable miscalculations." She later notes “In the old days we used to blame people for acting imprudently, and say that since their bad choices were their own fault, they deserved to suffer the consequences. Now we see that these errors aren’t a function of bad character, but of our shared cognitive inheritance. The proper reaction is not blame, but an impulse to help one another.” This is the basic communitarian philosophy.

If we agree that people are prone to make errors, why should we expect the Nanny to be any different? Even going on the best data, we can still expect mistakes. Remember all of the conflicting studies on whether caffeinated coffee is a health hazard or a benefit? Is salt good or bad for you? It is one thing if an individual makes a bad call, he or she will pay the price. If the Nanny makes a bad call, we all pay the price. If the Nanny is corrupt, the consequences could be catastrophic.

The truly terrifying thing is the underlying assumption of the argument. If we are incompetent to make basic decisions, can we be trusted to make any decisions at all? Can a person who is incapable of deciding how much soda to buy able to determine their career path, who to marry, whether to have children, or deciding where to live? Can such people be trusted to select their leaders? Granted Ms. Conly claims that would never happen. Really? Historical precedent is not encouraging.