With metastasizing regulations empowering arrogant Federal and State governments to intrude further into our lives, we are losing the right to make basic, everyday decisions, including what foods we choose to consume. For law enforcement, no threat, no matter how fanciful or inconsequential, can go uninvestigated, unprosecuted or unpunished. The intrusive, smothering, and overbearing Federal and State governments we quietly suffer would prove so intolerable to our Founding Fathers that they would discard their quills and reach for their muskets.
Our Federal and State governments have nibbled away at our freedom to decide for ourselves. And after decades of nibbling, these governments have robbed us of self-sovereignty. To power hungry government officials, every thicket conceals another bogeyman or contumacious individual who must be imprisoned or broken to the harness. Every citizen, no matter how well intentioned, must be subordinated to the regulatory system.
Though reportedly hamstrung by budget shortfalls, our vigilant Federal and State governments have cobbled together the necessary law enforcement resources to declare war on those lately posing a grave threat to our nation’s health – milk merchants. Alarmed that a free citizen might pour unpasteurized buttermilk on his Cheerios, Federal and California law enforcement agents raided Rawesome Foods, a Venice, California food co-op selling organic fruits and vegetables and raw milk, and arrested James Stewart, the 65-year-old owner and founder. Though selling unpasteurized milk is legal in the state of California, to prevent Stewart from menacing willing buyers with unrefined cream, he was jailed for several months.
Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
~George Washington
Determined to rid white poison merchants nationwide, in 2011 armed agents of the Food and Drug Administration descended on the farm of Amish farmer, Dan Allgyer, an unrepentant peddler of un-homogenized lactic acid. He had operated Rainbow Acres Farm, which packaged and sold raw milk to a consumer group in the Washington, D.C. area until early 2012. Persuaded by the FDA and the US Attorney’s Office that this recalcitrant merchant posed a significant danger to society, courageous Federal District Court Judge Lawrence Stengler issued a permanent injunction against Allgyer’s illicit activities. Citing the stress on his family, Allgyer shut down his farm. Stewart and Allgyer would have been better off growing something more wholesome, like marijuana.
It is for our own good, so say government officials when justifying ever more encroachments on our freedom. Or worse, it’s to protect children. By denying us opportunities to exercise our judgment, the government infantilizes us. Confined to a highchair, we come to depend on know-it-all government officials to decide and provide for us, and fling our rattles to the floor in disgust when they refuse us a sugar tit. As former Texas Congressman and presidential candidate Dr. Ron Paul has noted, “This mindset fuels the growth of the nanny state and inevitably leads to what C.S. Lewis said may be the worst form of tyranny ‘…a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims.’”
Last week, Dr. Paul wrote an op/ed piece for Eurasia Review wherein he decried “[t]he use of force by federal agents to enforce unjust and unconstitutional laws [as] one of the major, albeit overlooked, threats to liberty.” As Dr. Paul succinctly concluded:
All Americans… should be concerned about the use of force to limit our choices. This is because there is no limiting principle to the idea that the government force is justified if used “for our own good.” Today it is those who sell raw milk who are being victimized by government force, tomorrow it could be those who sell soda pop or Styrofoam cups.
~Dr. Ron Paul
But, long inured to the yoke, we are dispiritingly dispirited. Will we only rise up and cast off these regulatory chains when they prove so burdensome that we can no longer breathe? Better to act now, before we have been dispossessed of all vigor.
Kevin J. Mahoney is a Massachusetts criminal defense lawyer.
