Lefty Fetishes and G K Chesterton

A thought-provoking little item highlighted at Cold Fury which calls to mind the great Chesterton.

.....Let me give another example of left-wing Puritanism in action... which will be recognizable to many of you. Last month, at a birthday party for a three-year-old, I was hit with the realization that most of the parents around me were in the grip of moral panic, the kind of fear of contamination dramatized so well in The Crucible. One mother was trying to keep her daughter from eating a cupcake, because of all the sugar in cupcakes. Another was trying to limit her son to one juice box, because of all the sugar in juice. A father was panicking because there was no place, in this outdoor barn-like space at some nature center or farm or wildlife preserve, where his daughter could wash her hands before eating....

Ah, yes, that's familiar.  The quoted column-author is a Lefty, and he's addressing Bloombergian Puritanism.  But behind that Bloombergian fetish is G K Chesterton's prescient quote:

“When you break the big laws you do not get freedom. You do not even get anarchy. You get small laws.”

The New Puritans, beginning with Wilson, were determined to re-manufacture civilization without the fuss and bother of the 10 Commandments.  So now we have the 10 Billion Commandments of Slurpee regs, EPA regs, toilet-and-lightbulb regs, and ObozoCare regs.

Chesterton was right, but I doubt he could have imagined the scale of the problem.