Liberty Alone

I seem to have raised the ire of Cllr Tim Kent by calling his proposal to force children to eat healthy school meals.

There is so much wrong with this I don’t really know where to start.

Firstly, in response to his blog post, I didn’t recognise any dig at Jamie Oliver and I certainly don’t care about Jamie Oliver. He’s an irritating TV chef, that’s about it.

Now to get onto the idea of compulsory school meals and why it is illiberal and authoritarian.

This is a coercive measure. It is seeking to force people to act in a particular way ‘for their own good’. This is generally accepted by liberals to be wrong. JS Mill stated this very succinctly:

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

The natural retort to this in this case is that its fine for adults, but these are children, they don’t have the ability to make sensible choices yet, so its fine for the government to do this for children.

This is a very worrying idea. It call for the furtherence of the removal of children from their parents to the state. Children are not fully responsible for themselves, that much is true, but the responsibility lies with parents. It is the parents’ right to choose what their child eats. To take such decisions away from the parents is to remove the parents even further from the raising of their child. It furthers the collectivisation of children which is a very dangerous trend. John Hemming MP is documenting and campaigning to prevent the current abuses of the state’s power over parents of children, do we really want to extend such power?

The final defense of the position comes from a collectivist and utilitarian point of view. It claims that it is best for the long run of society and lessen costs in the NHS.
What is best for ’society’ (whatever that is in this case) is not sufficient argument for government intervention. People themselves must choose to act or not. That is the liberal way. The collective good is not a liberal justification since it can run counter to the rights of the individual (which in this case it does).
As for cost savings in the NHS this again is no justification for action. To take this desire for savings towards an extreme, perhaps it would be best to steralise people who it is determined won’t feed their children ‘properly’? An appeal to saving costs is an excuse for illiberal measures by government to try and dig itself out of a hole of its own creation.

I hope I have shown that this measure is illiberal. Individual choice is at the heart of liberalism, this removes freedom, liberty and choice. As is typical of these sorts of proposals, it resorts to arguments of collective good and utility.

As for being authoritarian, well, this would be the government using its authority and power to force people into conforming with its ideals. That’s authoritarian in my book.

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