Government Can Fix neither Food nor Farm

With the national health crisis, food debauchery, and farm exploitation suddenly jumping to headlines via RFK, Jr., numerous people have offered solutions but nothing gets to the heart of the problem.

BY JOEL SALATIN

View original article at Brownstone.org.

With the national health crisis, food debauchery, and farm exploitation suddenly jumping to headlines via RFK, Jr., numerous people have offered solutions but nothing I’ve seen truly gets to the heart of the problem.

Recently RFK, Jr. gave his recipe but in general, it’s yet another request for government intervention in these fields (pun intended). Capping drug prices, prohibiting research grants from going to people with conflicts of interest, and reforming crop subsidies to incentivize healthier alternatives all sound nice. Eliminating SNAP (formerly food stamps) from being spent on high fructose corn syrup drinks ($9 billion annually) sounds good too. 

Who can disagree with requiring nutrition courses in medical schools and demanding government research grants go toward holistic and alternative health approaches? All of this sounds good in theory, but how? Goodness, we now have official government findings that Cheerios and Fruit Loops are more nutritious than beef. Who is going to make the kinds of U-turns within the bureaucracies that such changes would require?

I remember well when President Obama was elected and Michelle put a garden on the White House lawn. My friends in the organic farming community thought the country would enter ecological farming nirvana…until someone said, “Remember, 10 miles of USDA offices will not change.” Therein lies the Achilles’ heel of all this nice-sounding rhetoric.

Epoch Times carried a full-page column by pediatric Dr. Joel Warsh last week titled “America’s Health Crisis: Expanding on RFK Jr.’s Plan to Make America Healthy Again.” As much as his thoughts may sound good, they still suffer from the same old government interventionist mindset. He wants a “National Emergency Declaration of Health.” Can you imagine the wrangling, jet fuel, focus groups, and lobbying that would occur with such an initiative?

He suggests we should “recreate the food pyramid” with good food and pastured meat and eggs on the bottom instead of the top. You’d have to move the entire climate change, cow farts narrative to make this happen. Then yet more government mandates: corporations with more than 100 employees “should be required to offer wellness programs that include fitness classes, nutritional counseling, and mental health services.” Oh my, we’ve now exchanged one nanny for another.

He wants health education taught in all public schools, regulations banning junk food ads when children watch TV, and subsidies for organic and transitioning farms. This is just a sampling of his list and much of it would indeed be good…if it were possible. But it’s not. Simply put, to get a legislative and bureaucratic push on these kinds of agendas is insanity according to Albert Einstein’s definition: “trying to solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.” I believe we are where we are in all these areas due to government micro-management; asking for government to get us out is asking for all the agencies, all the politicians, all the lobbyists, all the Happy Meals addicts, all the Chick-fil-A cultists, to do a 180. Ain’t gonna happen.

So you ask “Well, it’s easy to be negative. What’s your solution?” I think when we engage in these kinds of same-thinking solutions, we obfuscate the simple and consistent argument that carries the most weight.

While my plan may not sound doable either – and I admit on the surface that’s true – I think it takes a higher philosophically consistent road. And instead of trading one regulation for another, one bureaucrat for another, one agency for another, it cuts to the heart of the problem and offers a more defensible position. The most disempowering mindset is one that assumes the only solutions are from the government. Private certification, independent research, and individual choice offer much better solutions. Here we go.

1. Pass Congressman Thomas Massie’s Constitutional amendment: “The right of the people to grow food and to purchase food from the source of their choice shall not be infringed, and Congress shall make no law regulating the production and distribution of food products which do not move across state lines.” 
   
   Thousands and thousands of farmers, and non-farmers, wish to engage in neighborly food commerce but current regulations prohibit these transactions. Try selling raw milk in Virginia. Try making a chicken pot pie and selling it to a neighbor. Try selling a pound of sausage from a home-butchered backyard pig to a neighbor. It’s all illegal. And if a state wants to make it legal, the federal government intercedes to recriminalize it. 
   
   This simple addition of standing for consumers to exercise food choice as voluntary, consenting adults with their farm neighbors would completely revolutionize America’s food system. Many people want to buy alternative food. Farmers want to sell. All of this illegal food can be given away, but just can’t be sold. What is it about exchanging money that suddenly turns a benevolent morsel into a hazardous substance? The centralization and opaqueness in America’s food system is upon us precisely because of government overreach. If you want to buy at WalMart, fine, enjoy the government oversight. But if I want to go to a neighbor’s farm and look around, smell around, and voluntarily opt out of the federal government’s fraternity, I should be able to choose my microbiome’s fuel. How could anyone oppose that?

2. Eliminate ALL government intervention in health care. Period. All licensing, all payments, all research. Everything. It’s not the government’s job, among its enumerated powers, to tell us how to be healthy or fix sickness. Although my wife and I are well beyond the age when people go on Medicare, we have opted not to take it because we refuse to let the government dictate our health protocols. Even though we paid thousands of dollars into these programs over our lifetime, they are fraught with fraud, corruption, and death.
   
   Had there been no Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to broadcast fear-mongering and anti-science and line the pockets of pharmaceutical companies during Covid, not a single additional person would have died. And no, President Trump was not a hero for bringing mRNA jabs to the public quickly. If health really is about “My body, my choice,” then let’s spread that liberty across the spectrum, not just for the unwanted pregnancy.
   
   If I want to start a hospital for atheist bowlegged Vietnamese and give them an unorthodox concoction, great. I’ll either stay in business or go out of business real fast. The only way to inculcate responsible decision-making in a populace–what I call discernment exercise–is to put the onus for bad decisions on the ones who made the decisions. The government agents who demanded injections aren’t suffering for the debilitating death their requirements caused. Let us all live or die based on our own sleuthing; that will push us all to seek our truth.
   
   So-called “safety nets” have caused more irresponsible behavior than anyone can imagine. If someone wants to drown in alcohol or drugs, fine. Why should I pay for those decisions? If a philanthropic agency wants to try to rescue folks, wonderful. In fact, without being taxed to death, we’d all have way more money to support the charitable causes of our choice; how about that for a change?

3. Eliminate ALL government intervention in food, welfare, and education. Yes, from SNAP to corn insurance. Get rid of all of it. Right now, my taxes go to a plethora of abhorrent, culture-destroying initiatives. That includes cost sharing for biogas balloons at Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), the school lunch program, and mandatory industry check-off schemes.
   
   And the education component is not a typographical error. From colleges to kindergarten, get the federal government out of education, where most of the country’s nonsensical thinking gets planted, watered, and takes root. You’d think if we wanted to battle drugs, we’d shut down the incubator: 70 percent of all first-time drug use occurs in public schools. Remand everything to the states and eliminate the federal Department of Education. 
   
   The nutrient deficiency on our farms and in our food system is largely the result of land grants and other government-subsidized institutions of higher learning. Let them all stand on their feet. The plethora of small colleges going bankrupt is symptomatic of the centralization that inherently follows all government intervention. Big government creates big institutions; you cannot preserve small businesses in a big government environment. The dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico is an environmental disaster facilitated by big government narratives and programs. 
   
   The fuel for nonsense spews forth from the government gusher. Shut off the government intervention and at least you spread out foolishness to smaller entities. Removing federal involvement does not guarantee the right thing, but at least it democratizes idiocy and offers an opportunity for alternatives to see the light of day.

While these three ideas smack of absurdity in our current cultural climate, I suggest they enjoy a purity and consistency of thought that is actually easier to defend than exchanging one federal agency for another. One regulation for another. One rule for another. Instead of switching around the deck chairs on the Titanic, how about we proceed with humility that recognizes nothing is too big to sink? Exchanging one iceberg for another won’t get us where we need to go. We need to change course by getting out of the icebergs.

Thank you for considering.

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