Over at Real Clear Politics, Jean Yarbrough has a response to a New York Times op-ed defending Michael Bloomberg’s soda ban. The Times piece was written by Sarah Conly, a Bowdoin College professor who seems to specialize in coercive paternalism.
I don’t mean to cast aspersions–that’s actually the title of Conly’s book: Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism, which, as a title, probably goes over better than Authoritarianism, a Defense: It All Depends on Who Gets to Be the Tyrant.
What makes the Yarbrough response so interesting, though, is that (1) she also teaches at Bowdoin, and (2) she points out that while Conly is currently defending the right of the state to ban Big Gulps, her next project is a little more ambitious. Here’s Yarbrough:
But remember: When conservatives warn about where liberal impulses eventually lead, they’re just scaremongering. It’s not like the New York Times would farm out space for policy arguments to people who are completely outside anything even resembling either the popular or intellectual mainstreams. Nothing to see here, folks. Just move right along.
