KILL THE SPIDER

Have you ever heard the ditty about the lady at a church prayer meeting pleading for God to get the spiderwebs out of her life?  A saintly matron nearby interrupted:  "God, just kill the spider."

                  That's a great way to look at all the hoopla surrounding RFK Jr.'s "Make America Healthy Again" campaign.  While I deeply appreciate RFK Jr. and what  he's brought to the current American discussion around everything related to health, food, and farming, I'm at odds with starting a new set of regulatory rules and agencies to implement his agenda.

                  He wants to stop USDA folks from benefitting financially on food and drug deals.  He wants to criminalize health research funds  going to scientists with conflicts of interest.  He wants to cap drug prices, restrict Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds from going to sugary beverages ($9 billion annually), and subsidize organic foods instead of chemical-based crops. 

                  While this all sounds nice, it's ridiculous, actually.  Remember when Michelle's White House garden made people think we'd see a difference in food policy?  Not a chance.  Some 10 miles of USDA offices never changed occupants.  The Little Debbie plant here in Augusta county uses more than 1 million pounds of sugar a week in its pastries. That's just one plant in one town.   

                  If you start shutting them down, Happy Meal zombies will whine about job losses.  It's tilting at windmills.  Further, it's simply exchanging one nanny state for another nanny state.  Nanny states are all bad; even if they start well, they end up bad.  The spider webs we have in this country are due to a big spider called Federal Government overreach.

                  Nothing in the Constitution, ethics, morality, or liberty allows or encourages federal oversight in food, farming, education, health care, energy, housing.  Instead of exchanging one set of bureaucrats for another, why don't we just kill the spider?  While killing the spider may seem ridiculously impossible right now, and I admit it is, at least when we argue for killing the spider we can do so with a straight face.  We don't have to do philosophical gymnastics to make our case. 

                  Get rid of all federal government involvement in health care.  Period.  If I want to start a hospital for bow-legged atheist Vietnamese patients and they want snake oil curatives, fine.  Eliminate all welfare, all Medicare, all Medicaid, all federal "safety nets."  They're part of the spider web that entangles us.  If we all could keep our money from taxes, spend it the best way we choose, suffer the consequences of bad choices, and do our own credentialing individually or cooperatively, we'd at least democratize idiocy instead of concentrating it in the hands of big government.  Realize I'm making a big distinction here between federal government and all others. 

                  You can't have thriving small business, thriving entrepreneurship, thriving innovation in a big federal government climate.  Big federal government and small anything don't co-exist.  The problem is our country doesn't have a consistent and credible champion willing to say "kill the spider."  Right now we have more people on the doll than we do producing needed products and services.  No wonder we can't get traction killing the spider.

                  We don't need a different program.  We don't need a different rule.  We don't need a different agency.  Those are just more webs to be spun out and enslave us.  What we need is to kill the spider:  federal government micro-intervention and micro-management of everything.  Goodness, you can't pee without a permit.  Enough.  Kill the spider. 

                  If your taxes dropped by 80 percent, what would you spend the money on?