Tag: food

Stay Puft America

FDA, regulations, food, rules, diet, fads

“It was perhaps just a matter of time before issues of health — not policies over health-care provision but actual human health — would enter into our politics,” surmises Jeffrey A. Tucker in The Epoch Times. “We look at pictures of people in cities or at the beach in the 1970s and compare them with today and the results are shocking. We have changed as people and for the worse.”

Jeff Tucker is trying to explain the background for a big policy-interest shift, as a result of the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., endorsement of Donald J. Trump. Kennedy’s big issue is health, and Trump’s gone along with it, willing to make it a part of his agenda.

In “How Did Health Become a Political Issue?” Tucker focuses first on the COVID debacle, moving on to the real culprit: government.

Or, technically, government and industry, combined into one huge Stay Puft Marshmallow of Destruction. For behind our changing eating patterns and food habits are government tariffs, subsidies, researchstrategies, diet crazes, and much, much more.

Perhaps even bigger than Big Pharma is Big Agribiz, a conglomerate of companies pushing lab-created additives and worse on a trusting public, or, as Tucker puts it, “many decades of heavy government subsidies for the worst food, and so much in the way of corn, soy, and wheat are produced that we’ve invented new ways to use it.”

But it’s not really “we’ve.” The Standard American Diet (SAD) wouldn’t have existed were it not for the USDA and the FDA and a whole alphabet soup of bureaus captured by the industries they were assigned to regulate, working together in a Big Biz/Gov partnership to create a Big Problem in the general population.

Somehow, though, when asked about the government causes of SAD, RFKj said he wouldn’t abolish anything. He merely wants “better regulations.”

Someone needs a fast …from Big Government.

That someone? Kennedy.

And America.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

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free trade & free markets regulation too much government

SAD Regulators

nanny state, regulations, food, safety, health

Americans are getting sicker and fatter on government-approved, corporate-made foodstuffs, yet government continues to crack down on the sale of natural and home-made foods.

The classic case is raw, whole milk. I’ve talked about this before. The most recent case is from Amish country, where the State of Pennsylvania raided a farm “on suspicion of selling ‘illegal milk,’ among other products,” explains The Epoch Times, and the farm “is being sued by the Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General and Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.”

The Amish farm “has been ordered to halt all sales of its dairy products, inspiring widespread anger over what critics have called a blatant example of government overreach.”

At issue is government interference in farmers and customers freely choosing to skip the major grocery outlets multinational companies and dealing with each other on a local, free-market basis. “Capitalist acts between consenting adults,” as Robert Nozick put it.

But it’s especially galling when placed in the wider context of the FDA’s and USDA’s obvious failure to produce a healthier populace. Though the state’s attorney general insists that “we cannot ignore the illnesses and further potential harm posed by [the] distribution of these unregulated products,” the illnesses caused by what many call the Standard America Diet (SAD) go unnoticed and unregistered as such.

One standard for “the market,” another for the regulators.

Meanwhile, the State of Wisconsin is pushing a new bill to impose a $20,000 annual sales cap on participants in the state’s cottage food industry, “one of the most restrictive in the nation,” explains Suranjan Sen, an attorney at the Institute for Justice — a legal aid outfit often mentioned in these pages.

The very point of the law is to protect brick-and-mortar grocery and baked-goods stores — not the health of consumers. It has the backing of powerful lobbyists.

Looking for healthier foods and healthier economies? Don’t look to government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

Biden’s Peculiar Odor

William F. Buckley used to say that there is always a presumptive case for order.

Philosopher Joel Feinberg argued that there’s always a presumptive case for freedom.*

This notion of a strong case for or against something prior to specific data can keep philosophers and economists and folks like you and me awake at night.

Here, I’m just going to bring it down to the politics.

Of inflation.

Why are prices — especially fuel prices — rising so?

The Biden Administration has been trying to argue that it’s caused by the war in Ukraine, and Americans’ need to sacrifice to defend that beleaguered country.

But, as with his talk of “food shortages,” the war is almost certainly an exacerbating, not the prime, factor. Both fuel price spikes and bare shelves demonstrated an alarming trend before Putin invaded Ukraine.

The cause seems obvious. Do we really need careful studies to show that both were caused by (a) COVID lockdowns and (b) a blizzard of lockdown bailout checks during Trump’s term in office and eagerly pushed also by the current president?

And Biden’s current kick, of demanding that gas stations (!) freeze or reduce prices to “match the cost of production,” has all the odor of cranky, old-fashioned soapbox socialism.

There is a presumptive case that inflation is caused by monetary policy, just as shortages are usually caused by regulations. Trump and Biden and Congress all contributed to over-spending, financialization, and regulatory hits.** But the stink of the growing mess must also affix especially to Biden. After all, one of his campaign promises was to cut production of oil on all government lands and offshore.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (1972), pp. 20 – 22. Where Buckley discussed his presumptive case is your guess or mine. Probably a column back in the 1970s or ’80s.

** A few weeks ago an interesting exchange occurred in this website’s comments section, between two friends of this program.

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h/t crAIyon

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Tags covid, food, inflation, Joe Biden, lockdown, monetary policy, Ukraine

Common Sense free trade & free markets general freedom property rights responsibility

Farming Is Fundamental

If you live in Maine, you may now grow your own food. The right to do so has been safeguarded in the state constitution.

If you have the right to life and to sustain your life, surely you have a right to farm. As we all know, though, governments regularly find excuses to interfere with all kinds of peaceful activities.

So this past November, Maine voters passed a constitutional amendment authored by Rep. Billy Bob Faulkingham (whose energetic campaigns for freedom have previously caught Common Sense notice) and proposed by the legislature.

Maine’s Right to Food Amendment makes clear that “All individuals have a natural, inherent and unalienable … right to save and exchange seeds and the right to grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume . . . as long as an individual does not commit trespassing, theft, poaching or other abuses of private property rights public lands or natural resources in the harvesting, production or acquisition of food.” (So there’s no California-style de facto “right” to loot.)

Foes of the amendment worry that it will enable people to bypass regulations.

Let’s hope so.

Don’t we want the new law to ban governments in Maine from banning agriculture for the sake of “esthetics,” protecting Big Milk, or any other rationalization for foiling farming on a person’s own property?

And for the idea to spread to the other states, where far too often the scales of justice don’t properly consider the citizen’s right to produce food against the bureaucrat’s regulations frustrating same.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture nannyism too much government

Potluck Rites, and Rights

potluck, food, inspection, safety, regulations, government, folly, Common Sense, illustration

Progressives are becoming increasingly defensive about nearly all forms of Big Government, relentlessly telling us that we need government for everything from money and roads to food inspection and subsidies and … well, the list is endless.

Food safety is one of their favorite subjects, but I’m increasingly skeptical. Do we really need to be protected from our neighbors’ produce and cooked goods, as can be found in community bake sales and potlucks?

In Arizona, legislators had long carved out an exemption from commercial food safety regulations for potluck and similar “noncommercial social events.” Great. But there was an unfortunate limitation to the exemption: it applied only to such events that took place at a workplace.

Home or church? Potlucks there are still against the law.

So of course officials took the occasion of said “loophole” to crack down on some neighborly events in an Apache Junction mobile home park, in Pinal County.

I’m sure hundreds, perhaps thousands of these events are routinely ignored by Arizona’s police. Indeed, I bet half of the state’s better cops engage in such activities themselves — just because potlucks are part of everyday life all over the country.

But the idiotic regulation allowed public servants (loosely so called) discretionary powers to attack a few people for reasons tangential to community safety. Thankfully, Rep. Kelly Townsend has introduced HB 2341, which would extend potluck freedom beyond the office or warehouse workplace.

Let us be clear: this was not a problem waiting to be solved by Big Government. It is a Big Government problem to be solved by new legislation to de-regulate home and community potlucks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags big government, food, regulation, regulations

folly free trade & free markets nannyism

A New, Freer Sector

Current trends in public policy and law seem to be pointing not to consistent principles, but contradictory ones.

Wyoming just made it legal for farmers to sell directly to local customers, in such venues as farmers’ markets — without government inspection and conformity to the usual, clunky set of regulations that apply when selling to other businesses for resale.

The bill, recently signed into law by the governor, also allows neighbors to sell homemade foods to one another informally and at special community events like bake sales.

An obvious win for freedom. Who can argue against a free market in foodstuffs at the community level, where normal transactions tend to be customary and casual, and also obviously subject to regulation by reputation?

But government regulations still apply maximally to farmers and supermarkets and grocery chains. And yet, many of the arguments for local free markets apply equally to these currently controlled ones. Free competition would likely lead to the re-introduction of reputation economies into big agribiz markets. Could very well be transformative.

For our health.

After all, it’s not as if government has really helped us in this realm. We are right now working our way out of a government-sponsored health and diet paradigm that we are learning was exactly wrong.

The official “anti-fat” hysteria made us fat.

A more competitive approach, allowing for different philosophies to operate — as they can at the community level, with old recipes co-existing with the new-agey ones, as well as with non-pasteurized milk and organic farms and local cheese and everything else — would encourage new ways of meeting old food fears as well as accommodating new food fads.

Extend freedom. (Not waistlines.)

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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