the fact is you would have to be totally inebriated to eat a burger that is 20% fat next to a thousand and one screaming kids.

They can’t be 20-percent fat--they’d taste better if they were.

So, the question appears to be, should we let people choose, if we know that they’re going to choose badly?  I tend to think ‘yes’, certain presidential election results notwithstanding.

BTW, has Johnny Rocket’s gone downhill, a bit? I just went to one for the first time in about five years, and there wasn’t that frisson of pleasure.  The staff looked tired, not much smiling going on.

Bill, I would like to qualify your question “should
we let people choose, even if they choose badly” with
another question “Am I going to be stuck with the
consequences when it goes wrong?” Too many people
mistake the freedom to make wrong decisions with the
freedom to let other people clean up after them.

If by their decisions, I am to be negatively affected,
and I see no intention of them to avoid bringing bad
effects to me, then self-defense dictates that I should
try to prevent them from all legal means.

I mean, if people want to eat at McDonald’s fine, but
if that means that my favorite cafe has to close, I may
have something to say about that. Because *I* am now the
one deprived of choice.

“...shouldn’t we paleocons be free not only to choose
not to patronize Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, and Microsoft,
but also to convince others to do likewise?”

The preceding comment by Mr. Richert hits the heart
of the discussion.

If a liberal says something I find inane, and
I write an essay dissecting said inanity, the liberal
frequently responds by saying, “What, are you trying
to censor me?  Don’t I have the freedom to say what
I want?”

Which is true—except that the liberal forgets that
just as he has the right to speak, I have the right
to retort.

I hope the analogy is obvious.  That is, the liberal
equates criticism of faulty reasoning with advocating
censorship, just as some libertarians equate paleo
warnings about the effects of the corporate world
with paleos advocating intervention on the part of
the socialist hand of government.

All that is said with all due respect to Mr. Raimondo,
for whose work I have very high regard and whom
I would certainly not compare to the average postmodern
liberal.  (The analogy is only for the purpose of
illustration.)

OK, free-market of freely-choosing individuals, fine;
but we as individuals must also retain the freedom
to condemn and lament the ugly and dehumanizing, yes?

And to persuade our fellow-citizens to turn away from
the ugly and the dehumanizing?

“BTW, has Johnny Rocket’s gone downhill, a bit? I just went to one for the first time in about five years, and there wasn’t that frisson of pleasure.  The staff looked tired, not much smiling going on. “

okay but how was the FOOD

The latest issue of Ode Magazine has an article on
the slow food movement.

John Lukacs is right, a lot of Greens are conservatives
who do not know it, and Ode magazine is a prime
example. 

http://www.odemagazine.com

It’s certainly in libertarian circles an often unrecognized truth that there is a big difference between the economic realm and the realm of values.

Now of course our values inform our belief in free-market economics. But that doesn’t mean we value what the market brings about. Further complicating the matter is the fact that our economy is very far from free and just because a business is successful doesn’t mean its success isn’t due to distortions in the market economy rather than because people truly find their product valuable (I say this because this is something that is often overlooked by libertarians).

I think that where the market ends is where civil society begins. Values aren’t something that exist in a vacuum - they change and can be changed by the culture we live in. And although one can believe that people should be free to pursue whatever values they want (as long as they respect the rights as others), one can at the same time and without self-contradiction find fault with and criticize these values.

And this debate that arises over values would exists even in the most perfect and free of societies. In my opinion, our politics is really a cheap substitution for this debate, since (a) the values being debated are to be forced on everyone else and (b) they are often red-herrings for more ominous considerations (the attainment of power over others).

Because in this sense society is still in somewhat of a primitive state, people think that if you are for or against something that you advocate forcing your views on others. This is true only to the extent that you feel the State is the final arbitrator of all values. In a truly civil society, one’s values need not be a threat to another’s.

In fact, the Wal-Marts of the world are not an example of “free markets,” but are highly dependent on state subsidies. Wal-Mart could not exist without the “free"-ways; the urban sprawl that creates such places is neither an accident nor the result of markets, but is the result of deliberate gov’t planning, a plan that destroyed the cities. See http://tinyurl.com/2l6foz for more on this system of subsidies.