Not satisfied with hounding smokers and purveyors of Big Gulp sodas – or even gun manufacturers – nanny-staters have reached way back into their historical toolkits to go after alcohol. That’s right, in this the 80th year since the repeal of Prohibition, a new coalition has arisen to take on the scourge of demon rum.

But these aren’t your great-granddaddy’s Baptists and bootleggers; instead we have a transnational alliance of “public health professionals” out to make the world a more sober place.  Not satisfied with the persuasiveness of their entreaties, however, they further want to muzzle alcohol producers and anyone else with a “stake” in the debate.  (Apparently limiting the freedom to drink isn’t enough for these people; the freedom of speech and to petition the government for redress of grievances are also suspect.)

Here’s Exhibit A, a “statement of concern” put out in February by a group of public health advocates calling themselves the Global Alcohol Policy Alliance.  In a nutshell, GAPA doesn’t like the fact that the beverage alcohol industry is involved in the debate on how to reduce alcohol abuse, not even the commitments that 13 of the largest alcohol producers made in support of the World Health Organization’s “Global Strategy to Reduce the Harmful Use of Alcohol.  The most revealing “reservation” the GAPA-niks have is item 3 on page 3:

Prior initiatives advanced by the alcohol industry as contributions to the WHO Global Strategy have major limitations from a public health perspective …

That sounds rather innocuous – an academic disagreement about alcohol policy – but let me put this in context.  The public health community consistently advocates “population-based” controls that simply seek to reduce total alcohol consumption, regardless of whether alcohol abuse declines.  There could be cirrhotic ne’er-do-wells dying in the streets, but as long as yuppies buy less Jack Daniel’s, all is fine.  The alcohol industry, or anyone that cares about actually fixing social problems rather than taking steps that at best just make politicians feel good – call it the inverse Baptists/bootleggers – prefers a targeted approach: keep booze away from kids, get alcoholics treatment, don’t drink bad moonshine that’ll make you go blind, etc.

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Ezra Klein writes in the Washington Post that congressional Republicans have moved to the right on such issues as health care, stimulus spending, and a carbon tax, forcing Democrats to move to the center to find common ground. And thus:

If you imagine a policy spectrum that that goes from 1-10 in which 1 is the most liberal policy, 10 is the most conservative policy, and 5 is that middle zone that used to hold both moderate Democrats and Republicans, the basic shape of American politics today is that the Obama administration can and will get Democrats to agree to anything ranging from 1 to 7.5 and Republicans will reject anything that’s not an 8, 9, or 10. The result, as I’ve written before, is that President Obama’s record makes him look like a moderate Republicans from the late-90s.

His argument is that Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich used to support “the basic architecture of the Affordable Care Act,” John McCain (R-AZ) supported a cap-and-trade bill, George W. Bush pushed a stimulus bill in 2008—but now Republicans don’t want to support any of those policies. So, he says, Democrats have moved to the right, away from what they really want, like single-payer health care, command-and-control environmental regulation, and no cuts to entitlements plus massive new spending. He says that leads to center-right policy.

But another way to look at it is this: on his scale of 1 to 10, where 1 represents bigger government and 10 represents smaller government, what’s happening? Is government getting bigger or smaller? Take health care: if 1 represents national health care and 10 represents a free market in health care, then surely with income tax preferences for health insurance, Medicare, the prescription drug benefit, and government paying for more than half of all health care, we were at least at 5 by 2009. Everybody from Michael Cannon to Joe Biden thinks Obamacare is a BFD on the road to total government control of medicine. So let’s say it put us at 3 or 4.

You can see the same pattern in the other issues Klein discusses. Carbon tax, cap and trade, stimulus spending—they all make government bigger than it is now. So when Republicans endorse any of those policies, they are playing on bigger-government territory. Now, Republicans say they’re not going to do that any more. So Klein’s complaint is not really that Republicans are insisting on “8, 9, or 10” policies; they’re just no longer proposing policies in the 3 and 4 range, hoping that Democrats will agree to make government only a little bigger, rather than way bigger. Sounds like maybe the debate is moving back toward the 50-yard line, instead of taking place entirely in Democratic territory.

Note: Klein talked only about economic issues, so I’ve done the same. There’s a clear trend in a liberal/libertarian direction on social issues such as marriage and marijuana. And Republicans who propose further restricting immigration or getting involved in yet another Mideast war are hardly advocates of small government. This analysis deals only with fiscal, regulatory, and entitlements issues.

This is a provocative question, of course, or at least it is seemingly everywhere in the world but the United States. In just the last three years, the Supreme Court has protected highly offensive funeral protests, violent video games, animal “crush” videos, and a host of other types of expression. No law punishing blasphemy or “defamation of religion”—as approved by various UN resolutions and making inroads into the legal codes of even Western countries—could possibly survive First Amendment scrutiny. But that’s not the case elsewhere in the world, as an excellent new video by Danish human rights lawyer Jacob Mchangama shows (courtesy of Free to Choose TV; see press release):

America isn’t immune from increasing demands that free speech be limited to respect religious feelings. Recall the condemnations of the anti-Islamic video that may have caused rioting in Cairo on September 11 of last year (but not in Beghazi, as details of that scandal develop). The outcome of this battle will have profound consequences for the ability of people everywhere to freely express themselves and follow their beliefs. Democratic governments play a dangerous game when appeasing religious sensitivities rather than defending free speech.

Mchangama, not coincidentally, is affiliated with the invaluable Human Rights Foundation—an organization that deals with actual human rights violations rather than simply being a vehicle for pushing a transnational leftist agenda—whose president, Thor Halvorssen (with whom I’ve been acquainted since college), calls himself a “classical liberal” rather than a man of the Right or Left.