Daily Inspiration Quote by Tom G. Palmer

Palmer’s line is a scalpel aimed at the one assumption political argument loves to smuggle in: that power can be made benign simply by changing whose hands hold it. By insisting there is “no obvious reason” some normal adults should choose for other normal adults, he strips paternalism of its favorite disguise - expertise, moral urgency, even compassion - and forces it to justify itself as domination rather than care.

The phrasing does quiet rhetorical work. “Normal adults” is a deliberately unglamorous category: not saints, not geniuses, not victims in need of rescue. Just baseline people presumed competent to run their own lives. That makes paternalism sound not merely misguided but insulting, as if adulthood is a status you can lose whenever a policymaker feels confident. Palmer also punctures the myth that paternalism is a partisan quirk. By calling out “both left and right,” he’s pointing to a shared impulse: regulate diets, speech, drugs, finances, parenting, sex - then call it protection. Different moral vocabularies, same posture.

Contextually, Palmer is writing from a classical liberal/libertarian tradition that treats individual autonomy as the default and coercion as the exception requiring extraordinary proof. The subtext is a challenge to technocracy and moralism alike: your good intentions don’t create political authority. If you want adults to behave differently, persuasion is your ethical tool; compulsion needs a clearer warrant than “we know better.” In an era of “nudges,” bans, and safety-ism, the line lands as a reminder that the soft language of care can still produce hard limits on freedom.