“Hey, Libertarian! Get off our sidewalk!” is a saying I like to use to mock the hollowness and hypocrisy of the Libertarian movement. After watching an episode of American Experience called “The Poison Squad,” I may add this nugget to my repertoire: “Hey, Libertarian! Shouldn’t you be home inspecting your beef?”

Libertarians, in case you hadn’t guessed, give me indigestion. Their claims to champion freedom are little more than a thin veil over an essential selfishness that says, “You go your way and I’ll go mine, and don’t bother me with any appeals to common sentiment or responsibility.” They conveniently ignore all the ways a sense of citizenship and fellow-feeling benefit them every day of their lives; thus, the comments about sidewalks and meat inspection. If you are philosophically committed to individual freedom and the unfettered free market, which necessarily obviates collective actions that rely on taxation and government regulation such as infrastructure projects and the protection of our food, then you shouldn’t be allowed to walk on our streets or sidewalks or take advantage of the USDA’s and FDA’s regulatory power to ensure food and drug safety. It is the rare Libertarian who displays that kind of consistency and intellectual honesty. Most want to have it both ways—they want to enjoy the benefits of regulations and collective action while still waving their “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and whining about having to pay taxes.

All this was brought home to me by “The Poison Squad,” which highlighted the decades-long crusade of Dr. Harvey Wiley to ensure that dangerous “adulterative” additives were removed frrom American foodstuffs. Additives such as salicylic acid, borax, and formaldehyde. Stuff that can make you really sick or even kill you, but that companies routinely used to make unsafe foods such as spoiled milk or rotten meat appear edible. It’s just another in a long, sad litany of practices that prove that corporations cannot be trusted to police themselves. Think of the winter storm crisis in Texas last week. Eighty-some people died in part because Texas chose a long time ago not to join one of the two regulated power grids that every other state in the continental US is connected to. Rather than be subject to federal regulation, Texas decided to go it alone and allow its energy companies free rein, trusting the “hidden hand” of the marketplace to provide the needed safeguards. Well, guess what? The energy companies, without oversight, predictably failed to enact those expensive safeguards so that when the winter storm came along power went out all over the Lone Star State and people suffered and died.

Until tonight I knew nothing about Harvey Wiley, but now I am very glad for his tenacity and public spirit. He saw problems in the nation’s food supply, correctly diagnosed the problems as the result of corporate misbehavior for the sake of protecting profit, and waged a long and arduous campaign to make them do what they should have been doing all along: protecting their consumers. I am glad that there are still people out there, people whose names most of us may never know, who are still holding corporations’ feet to the fire, demanding that they do the important things for which there is no profit motive. Whether it’s the banking industry, energy companies, pharmaceutical concerns, or any other group that ostensibly serves the public, we need people who will not be cowed by their political connections and deep pockets, but will stand up and make them do the right thing.

Thank God for Harvey Wiley, and for all the other Harvey Wileys out there toiling in anonymity to counteract the narrative, and the self-centered rationalizations, of the Libertarian crowd.

And I mean it, get off the sidewalk!