A Hunger for Power

The House of Representatives of the United States passed HR2749 on July 29, 2009, a bill entitled The Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009. This innocuous sounding legislation, introduced by radical Rep. John Dingle (Democrat from Michigan) was designed to give greater authority to the Food and Drug Administration 'To amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to improve the safety of food in the global market, and for other purposes" or to grant the FDA the power to decide what and how Americans will eat.

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This was followed up by S.B. 510, a bill introduced by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, described as "A bill to amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act with respect to the safety of the food supply." One has to wonder why we need an amended bill to strengthen FDA oversight of the nation's food supply to begin with; the last major outbreak of food-related disease was the problem with bagged spinach in 2006. (That spinach was traced to Natural Selection Foods, LLC in San Juan Bautista, CA, an organic food grower - thank you environmentalists!) This does not appear to be a seriously pressing need, yet government is moving ahead anyway. One must ask why. According to the FDA;

"FDA has determined that enforceable standards (as opposed to voluntary recommendations) for the production and packing of fresh produce are necessary to ensure best practices are commonly adopted."

Notice the fundamental policy shift here; industry will be forced by government to obey arbitrary rules set down by fiat. In other words, instead of advising and assisting, the new rules will force the agricultural industry to obey. Essentially, Congress is authorizing a power grab, giving the bureaucracy greater authority over the American diet. This Would not be disturbing were it not for the designs of many in the Obama Administration; the FDA is considering regulations forcing the food industry to greatly reduce salt levels in prepackaged foods, for instance. You have Michelle Obama's Obesity Task Force, whose purpose is to fundamentally change what American children eat. Here are a series of recommendations by the Center for Disease Control for health policies. Their recommendations include restricting the right of soft drink manufacturers and chip companies to advertise, force schools and other public venues to cut food portions and replace popular foods with approved menu items, require more phys-ed in schools, push public transportation, etc. There is clearly a belief held by many in government that it is their responsibility to tell people how to behave, and to coerce them into obedience. And the net affect of this legislation will be a centralization of food production, as draconian regulations strangle the small farmholdings, according to Tim Carney in the Washington Examiner. With the passage of Obama's healthcare plan, America has declared the bodies of her citizenry to belong to the State. The government now has a vested interest in what Americans eat and how they live. In Britain there are health police, people who make "raids" on the homes of citizens for the purpose of checking their pantries. This is a direct outgrowth of decades of socialized medicine, and it is fast approaching in the United States as America follows the same path. Which brings us to the battle over raw milk. Many Americans are concerned about the hormones and treatment methods employed with the production of milk. The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund (FTCLDF) recently filed suit against the Food and Drug Administration for banning the sale of raw (untreated) milk as part of the Food Safety Modernization Act. The Iowa case is astonishing not so much for the subject at hand but for the argument made by the U.S. government. The FDA attorneys, in their request for dismissal, argue that; "Essentially, plaintiffs assert that they have a right to travel across state lines with unpasteurized milk. The Constitution recognizes no such right, however." So now purchases made in one state are subject to federal approval because the product is being brought into another state? This essentially argues that the government has the right, through the regulation of interstate commerce, to stop and inspect anyone moving about the country. It completely violates notions of federalism, as this is a matter for state and not federal authority. But it gets better: a. There is No Absolute Right to Consume or Feed Children Any Particular Food. and b. There is No Generalized Right to Bodily and Physical Health. While the arguments in this particular case may seem limited in scope, the reality is that the FDA attorneys are arguing that the citizens do not have a right to make decisions in their own interest. This is essentially a power grab, one with a very long reach. This will buttress the case that society has an overriding interest in your body. Now, abortion is the law of the land because of an inherent right to privacy, a claim that ignores the greater fundamental right to life of the unborn child. SCOTUS has ruled in Roe v Wade that the State does not have a sufficiently compelling interest in the unborn child to overrule the "right to privacy" that they found to inhabit the Constitution, a part of the tenth amendment. If the state does not have a right to keep someone from sticking a blunt object in a woman's womb and chopping up a baby, it surely does not have a right to determine someone's diet, or other behavioral patterns. Control of one's own body means precisely that - and that means that those who do not want to drink pasteurized and hormone laden commercial milk have every right to do so. It is their body, not the government's. There are people who do all sorts of unhealthy things. Consider unhealthy sexual practices; surely if government has a right to regulate our food, it stands to reason they can regulate sexual behaviors as well. Homosexual behavior is often very unhealthy, with many a slew of diseases resulting from certain actions common in the homosexual community. Is ingesting raw milk worse than inserting a fist into the anus? "Fisting" is a fairly common homosexual practice. Analingus, the practice of oral/anal contact, is certainly more unwholesome than drinking unprocessed milk; which is worse to ingest, raw milk or the remains of a bowel movement? Monica Lewinski's stained dress is a testament to the consumption of unwholesome substances; it didn't happen just because Bill was glad to see her. Will the FDA now regulate Bill Clinton's sex life? In point of fact, there are many things that can be dangerous if consumed improperly; we can undercook pork, for instance. People used to put raw eggs in beer, a practice that could well be dangerous. We have orange juice fortified with calcium, a practice that could lead to kidney stones. Alcohol is a poison; that's why we say a drunken man is intoxicated. Drink too much and you will die. And that does not even take into consideration the things that our own government requires of us; childhood vaccinations, which may have unhealthy side effects. (It has been suggested that vaccinations are part of the asthma problems in America; allergy-prone children are sent into permanent allergy attacks by them.) They have also been implicated in autism and juvenile diabetes. We have been flouridating water for decades, and it is possible to suffer illness as a result of flouride poisoning. And what are we doing when we give flu shots? We are giving a weakened or "dead" virus to make to people to strong. (By the way, I have had 5 or 6 flu shots in my life and have been violently ill with the flu after each and every one of them.) And, of course, there have been drugs approved by the self-same FDA, drugs like thalidomide or Avandia that have killed and mutilated people. Composine has been known to cause dystonia in people - a lifelong disability. Just because the FDA likes something does not make it safe. The point is, there are ranges of risk, ones that we accept in a free society. Toxicity is often a matter of degree, and a certain amount of bovine bacteria may be perfectly safe, in fact healthy, because it strengthens the immune system. If we were to live in a truly sterile environment we would be unable to live in the world at large; every microorganism would be a potential killer. There are levels of risk, and we would be foolish to rid ourselves of all risk. The obvious answer in this instance is to label raw milk. The FDA specifically rejects this:

"Plaintiffs argue that “FDA could use a less stringent means of regulating raw milk,” such as warning labels stating that the products are unpasteurized. Am. Compl. ¶¶ 79-81, 105-108. In promulgating 21 C.F.R. § 1240.61, FDA specifically considered “the use of labeling to ensure that consumers who voluntarily choose to consume raw milk are informed as to the risks inherent in that choice,” but FDA concluded, for reasons it explained, “that labeling is not an acceptable alternative approach.”'

A free society allows people to decide these things for themselves. That is the nature of freedom; the individual can decide what is best. Government's job is to make certain the individual does not harm another person in the pursuit of his or her own good. What we have here is an inversion of this doctrine, a benevolent despotism that believes the individual is a fool who needs to be cared for by his betters in government. The most egregious tyrants in history sold their agenda on this basis; Hitler, Stalin, Mao, all achieved power not by pure force of arms but by promises, by selling the notion that they acted in the best interests of the public. Paternalism and kindness are the paths to tyranny. When a people accept the yoke for their own good, they accept the yoke for the benefit of their masters as well. Soon after the facade falls, and power is exercised for it's own sake. The Left has always sought to control the diet of the populace; Hitler and the Nazis had health and dietary initiatives that sound surprisingly similar to those we are hearing today (along with anti-smoking initiatives, replacing the heads of corporations by government fiat, etc.). While scarcity made such dietary initiatives impossible for most communist countries, it certainly is a critical component of the modern Left, who see establishing an international diet as critical to breaking the old order. A nation is defined by it's cuisine as much as anything, and what people choose to eat binds them together. Change the diet and you will change the culture. If the FDA establishes the government's right to tell us what we can eat, it will be a short step to the government usurping control of food in general. Control food and you control the People. Should anyone doubt this, a Ukrainian would be happy to explain the realities; Stalin destroyed their country with an artificial famine to put an end to freedom in that inconvenient place. The power to control the food supply is the power to control the individual. The United States is walking down a treacherous path.