It's hardly any news to AT readers and other thinking conservatives that the elitist left operates on the idea that only their coterie of "educated" intelligentsia can possibly know what is good for the "unwashed" masses - and ought, by right have the power to make life's decisions and enforce them on everyone else.

It's also hardly news that the New York Times is the nation's major mouthpiece for promotion of this thinking and simultaneously propounds in its pages agendas intended to undermine traditional American culture and morals.

Today, however, one of the Timesers has let slip an outright admission of this core ideology.

Columnist Neil Genzingler, writing in the "City Critic" column on the first page of the Sunday Metropolitan Section makes it abundantly clear:

Perhaps you've noticed the trend among certain people these days to decide that certain other people are not living acceptable lives and must be reformed. I'm all for the concept, so long as I'm the one deciding what's acceptable and doing the reforming. [emphasis added]

And, true to the concept, the Sunday Review section features a cover page boldly splashed with a proposal to move the burgeoning nanny state into further regulation of what we may and may not eat. Penned by Mark Bittman, an erstwhile Sunday writer of rabbit-food recipes, the article condemns Americans' food and drink choices and proposes to control them via the means of taxation -- picking winners and losers in the marketplace much in the way that regulation is attempting to control the winners and losers in the light bulb industry.

"The food industry," he writes:

...appears incapable of marketing healthier foods. And whether its leaders are confused or just stalling doesn't matter, because the fixes are not really their problem. Their mission is not public health but profit, so they'll continue to sell the health-damaging food that's most profitable, until the market or another force skews things otherwise. That "other force" should be the federal government, fulfilling its role as an agent of the public good and establishing a bold national fix.

Tax policy, of course, is intended to raise revenue to support the government's operation of its legitimate functions. We do know that over the years, this idea has been corrupted by various tax rules more intended to encourage or discourage personal behavior, e.g. the discouragement of smoking by imposition of outrageously high imposts.

Whether through taxes, price controls, production quotas, or other means, this is a replay of Stalin's and Mao's philosophies and policies -- completely at odds with the values and traditions of the American free market economy and culture of personal responsibility, choice, and accountability.

Lest comestibles be the only area in which the Times's spokes-role for the far left be the only thing to spend an issue's paper and ink on, readers are also treated today in the Sunday Magazine section to an article by one Rebecca Traister advocating sluttiness, and a feature opinion piece in the Sunday Review recommends that parents allow their 16-year-olds to sleep around, even under the family roof.