Virtue-signaling—the practice of exhibiting your adherence to the latest left-wing social dictates—isn’t a societal problem when it’s voluntary. You may think it’s a touch pretentious to wear a pink lapel ribbon or to drive a Prius, but nobody’s forcing you to do it.
The trouble arises when progressive politicians try to force everybody else to virtue-signal along with them. As ever, the West Coast leads the way. A month ago, Seattle banned plastic straws. It wasn’t good enough for Seattle’s progressive thought-leaders themselves to abstain from using plastic straws. They insisted that everyone else do the same—meaning restaurants are now required to annoy their customers for the sake of a city policy that will have no ameliorative effect whatsoever on the environment. Other cities soon followed Seattle’s example. San Francisco, with its escalating crime rates and rampant illegal drug use, bravely outlawed plastic straws.
Last week the California legislature passed a similar measure. In May the bill passed the California state Senate by a vote of 32 to 7. The state’s lower house passed the bill 46 to 26. Once it’s ratified, it will be up to Gov. Jerry Brown to sign or veto it. The bill requires restaurants to offer only water or unflavored milk as the “default” drink accompanying kids’ meals. If it becomes law, restaurants serving kids’ meals will only be permitted to offer water, sparkling water, flavored water with no added sweeteners, unflavored milk, or “a nondairy milk alternative that contains no more than 130 calories per container or serving.”
If that were the whole story, it’d be an object lesson in the coercive power of local and state governments. Fortunately, that’s not the entire story.
The prospective law includes an important exception: Parents would still be allowed to order drinks other than water or milk for their kids. Which, of course, makes the entire exercise pointless. Parents who don’t let their kids drink soda or other sugary drinks are already ordering milk and water. Parents who let their kids drink soda and other sugary drink are mostly going to do it anyway.
We’re told the law is meant to counter child obesity, but it’s not clear that even its most fervid backers actually believe that it’ll have any effect on that problem. The bill’s lengthy explanatory section doesn’t even make that claim; it only says the bill is intended “to support parents’ efforts to feed their children nutritiously.” But of course, if more parents were already making efforts to feed their children nutritiously, child obesity wouldn’t be a problem.
As conservatives, we don’t believe much in paternalistic regulation and we don’t believe at all in pointless, paternalistic regulation. But if we did, we’d be tempted to outlaw the kind of legislative virtue-signaling on display these days in California.
