Last week, San Francisco became the first city in the nation to pass legislation banning the use of plastic bags in supermarkets, drug stores and other large retailers. For a country that consumes about 850 million gallons of oil a day and sends $20 billion a year to the Middle East buying it, it is a modest step in the right direction.

The measure will save an estimated 450,000 gallons of oil a year, a small dent in total US consumption but still significant. San Francisco is the 14th most populated city in the country. If we estimate that every city in the top 20 consumes the same amount of oil from plastic bags as San Francisco (a very conservative estimate), that would mean nine million gallons of oil saved per year if those cities banned plastic bags as well. One could imagine the even greater impact if smaller municipalities across the country followed suit.

Such a change will be a long time coming if mainstream reaction is any indication. USA Today, that beacon of journalistic excellence, came out with an editorial declaring cleverly “Plastic bag ban full of holes.” When I did a Google search for “San Francisco plastic bag ban” to research this story, the first Google News result was titled “San Francisco’s Plastic Bag Ban as Stupid as It Sounds.” And, of course, once the libertarians and objectivists got involved, all hell broke loose. David Holcberg of the Ayn Rand Institute decried the ban as “an outrageous abuse of government power” and argued that the government has “no right … to impose their preferences on the rest of us.”

This pattern of mockery is no surprise. It’s an only slightly milder version of the mockery New York City received when it banned the use of trans fat in restaurants for public health reasons. And that was only slightly milder than the mockery Chicago received when it banned the sale of foie gras for animal cruelty reasons (foie gras is the liver of a duck or goose that has been force fed until engorged).

Our society has an almost instinctive reaction against small-scale government regulations like these. It doesn’t help that this one came from San Francisco, a city not looked upon in a particularly respectful light by much of middle America (indeed, Bill O’Reilly once declared to the city, “If Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we’re not going to do anything about it.”). We scoff at these regulations and say things like, “There they go again” or “What will they come up with next?”

Skepticism of any exercise of government power is entirely healthy. Our many recent adventures in the exercise of executive power on the federal level could certainly have withstood a few hearty injections of skepticism. But there is a difference between being skeptical and dismissing out of hand any government measure that might at first seem unusual. Often times, measures that are at first called absurd end up being labeled as innovative, and what is at first sight outlandish will appear more reasonable when one gives it a little thought.

A big part of the problem rests in our perception of what exactly we are entitled to. The word “right” gets thrown around a lot in our society: natural rights, human rights, constitutional rights. Never are these terms invoked more often than by people who don’t know what they actually mean. When Holcberg claims government has “no right” to ban plastic bags, it is not entirely clear exactly what type of liberty interest he is claiming, but it certainly isn’t one that exists either legally or historically.

Government has the right to regulate. The exercise of that right in this case is nothing more than the kind of collective decision-making government is good for given that individuals simply cannot always solve big problems by themselves. San Francisco’s measure isn’t foolishness, it’s leadership. We need only wait for the rest of the country to recognize that.