Cloth Diapers and Big-Box Laws:
A Critique of Libertarian Ideals

December 31, 2006

I read a review of a book today that angered me.. but first let me tell you about our diapering dilemma. Baby is on the way and for the first part of December the big question around here was diapering method. We would prefer to use cloth diapers, but Emily could locate no diaper service in the area. I figured she must be looking in the wrong places, since the Fox Valley must be large enough to support a diaper service. Then we were at a Christmas party and somebody mentioned that Kimberly-Clark, the major corporation in these parts, had pushed out cloth diaper services. It was an a-ha moment.. of course! Look on the back of a package of Huggies diapers and sure enough you see that they are manufactured by Kimberly-Clark.

Here is a paragraph from the review that angered me, which was on the topic of the recent book Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government by the libertarian Charles Fried:

Fried's most valuable contribution is to highlight the abiding tension between personal liberty and the "welfare administrative state." Though he exaggerates in suggesting that policies like Quebec's enforced egalitarianism in health care or Vermont's small-town zoning preferences amount to full-blown regimes of oppression, "crammed down the throats" of dissenters, they are real infringements on individuals and cannot be dismissed simply by invoking the will of the majority.

So people in Vermont who don't get to shop at a Wal-Mart or Home Depot are having their liberty infringed upon? That is absurd as it assumes that the placement of a Wal-Mart in a small town is some kind of neutral fact.. that the people who don't want to shop at a Wal-Mart will simply continue not to shop there, while the people who do want to shop at Wal-Mart are finally free from the oppressive liberal regime. But a Wal-Mart is not a neutral fact, it fundamentally changes the economic playing field of the small town. Those people who enjoyed their small town will not have the same small town once the Wal-Mart arrives.. Why should a majority of people who want to preserve the character of their own town not be able to protect it?

Back to the diapers. I have no idea the extent to which Kimberly-Clark actively pushed out cloth diapering in this area.. but it strikes me as the kind of thing that corporations often do. It serves as an example of the way our lifestyle is often chosen for us by corporations. Let New York City ban trans-fats and the Appleton newspaper is filled with people complaining about silly government interference, but let a corporation directly determine and limit our choices in the name of profit.. and it is just the American way.

I am not crazy about a local government banning trans-fat, and I don't know about the specifics of the case in New York, but let's try to think about what could bring about this situation. The food and drinks served in schools has for a long time been influenced by corporations who establish a foothold by doing something nice like paying for the uniforms of a sports team. Only in the past few years has there been an effort to scale back this advance of junk-food and sugar drinks into the diet of students. These students have no real choice.. right? They are given poor food choices to begin with.. and develop a taste for bad foods thanks to this forced introduction. How is that not a loss of individual liberty? And why should a local government not step in and lay down some health rules for these corporations that bully students around and don't give them any real choices?

This kind of indirect corporate bullying is everywhere in our world. Yesterday we received in the mail a small box of baby formula from a large corporation. It is well known that babies do better with breast feeding.. so one would think that all effort should be centered on getting more mothers to breast feed.. but no, better to try and win us over as consumers of their product. It is true that no one is forced to choose baby formula over breast feeding.. but this relies on too nice a definition of advertising, which actively works to cognitively push people into buying products. A clearer sense of the cognitive force of corporate advertising for a large percentage of the population would open the way for more and stronger government push-backs.

I want to maximize individual freedom.. and keep government out of private decisions. I have no issue with that. The problem with modern conservatism is that as they sweep back government control in the economic and environmental areas of our life, corporate interests quickly move into the gap. The result is not gain for individual freedom, but the loss of individual freedom to a new foe: corporations. A new liberalism must have the strength to stand up to all these people who in the name of profit want to make our decisions for us.. about what we eat and where we shop. Legal limitation on these corporations is all about us taking back the control of our lives.. we should be the ones deciding how our landscape will look and what we want our children to eat.