Los Angeles

Like my friend Chad, I was too busy last week to weigh in on the debate over the ban on new fast food restaurants in South L.A. William Saletan of Slate does a good job taking on the idea that this is just another kind of zoning and that we libertarians should stop getting our collective undies in a knot over it:

When an old practice ventures into new territory, you can always choose to look at it as the same old thing. But in this case, the novelty of the application is what’s interesting. Most cities have long zoned liquor stores, and some have zoned chain restaurants for reasons other than health, such as tackiness. What’s new in L.A. is the zoning of fast food as a health threat akin to liquor. Health zoning has crossed the line from booze and cigarettes to food. This goes way beyond tackiness. In principle, it justifies banning the targeted restaurants not just here or there but everywhere…

This comparison has played a central role in the campaign for the moratorium. And it’s a crucial comparison, because it justifies and, to some extent, obscures a huge step: telling food merchants that they may not open any new outlets in certain neighborhoods because their kind of food is inherently unhealthy…

So if you’re going to start prohibiting certain kinds of food outlets, fast food is a logical food to target, southern L.A. is a logical place to do it (though I still think segregated food zoning as a solution to “food apartheid” is twisted), and one year is a logical introductory period. That’s what makes the L.A. ordinance worth debating: It presents the most tempting case for crossing the line to restrict food like cigarettes or whiskey. But you still have to decide whether to cross that line—and where you’ll stop once you do.

Read the whole thing here. I would add one other difference between traditional zoning and what the L.A. council is doing. As a default, we should leave the decision over what kinds of businesses open in a neighborhood to the interplay of entrepreneurs and customers. Legitimate zoning steps in to shore up externalities. So, for example, it’s understandable that we might want to restrict late night bars from opening if the noise they produce would adversely impact nearby residents. Or some businesses might be restricted because of their impact on traffic. More dubiously, neighborhoods might forbid chains because they have no community character. In all of these cases it’s the broader, external effects of the businesses that are being addressed. With the fast food ban, in contrast, the L.A. council is forbidding businesses to open for the good of the customers who would patronize them. That’s a major line to cross, and one that libertarians are justified in opposing.

(Yes, one could argue that the public health costs of obesity are a relevant externality. But that’s not a problem local to L.A., not addressed by this narrow ban, and a slippery slope I’d prefer not to go down.)