Yesterday’s post about SCOTUS green lighting California’s ban on crated sows elicited some wonderful responses.  Thank you.  This proposition does nothing to other states; it simply says that within California, pork from crated sows cannot be sold.  Presumably you could buy it outside California and bring it into the state to consume. It does not demand anything of other states.

            The one response I want to acknowledge was the gracious and thoughtful one about living without an FDA or EPA—who would protect the drug-buying consumer?  Who would protect the water?  Books have been written to answer these questions; trying to do so in a short post is nearly impossible, but I’ll try.

            Just because a government agency accomplishes something good does not mean that’s the only vehicle for doing the good.  Good can be accomplished many ways; the question is which way yields the least to human baseness?  No perfect system exists this side of eternity; the only objective is how to minimize evil (tyranny, corruption, injustice, etc.).  

            I was a product of public education; did I learn some things and have some positive experiences?  Absolutely.  But what if I’d been home schooled?  Or charter schooled?  Or boarding schooled?  Or Tibetan Monk schooled?  To justify anything because we can find a nugget of good is to quit looking for a better option.  

            What, then, could offer better options than an FDA or EPA?  One is ancient common law, which grew out of peasants protecting their “commons” from nobility’s encroachment.  If a corporation commits a harm to the environmental commons, the remedy lies in common law.  Our society has abandoned this wonderful heritage, replacing it with a bureaucratic technocracy of incestuous corporate-government overseers who do not answer to magistrates. And therefore no true redress exists; no true personal accountability.

            Another option is the press.  If the press were the people’s sole, or primary, sleuth of evil, not only would it do a more responsible job, subscribers would demand a more aggressive attitude.  Having been an investigative reporter on a daily newspaper for 2 years prior to returning to the farm fulltime Sept. 24, 1982,  I can assure you that newspapers even then accepted government and big business advertisers’ press releases like candy.  Today’s censorship is anathema to liberty.  And yes, hate speech and any other kind of speech is part of society’s conversation.

            Another option is what Adam Smith called the market’s “invisible hand.”  Think of items or services that have fallen into either disrepute or obsolescence due to either innovation or information.  Nobody had to buy hydrogenated vegetable oil.  Today nobody has to buy Lunchables or Hot Pockets, or drink Coke or eat boxed breakfast cereal.  A little intentional patronage could eliminate all those things in a day.

            Refusing to buy from polluting companies has an effect.  Today, refusing to buy vaccinated animals can be done without any laws or taxpayer funds.  All agencies birth out of good intentions and often accomplish some good.  But over time, they become a cure worse than the disease and we have an FDA that pushes mRNA and punishes raw milk.  We have an EPA that won’t let a farmer build a pond to control flooding and provide water to a parched soil.  

            We weigh two imperfect systems, recognizing that without FDA and EPA somebody might take a bad drug or dump poison in the water, we must also recognize that criminalizing alternative therapies and blessed land hydration are certainly as bad or worse.  The question, then, is which approach concentrates the propensity for evil in many hands or few?  A libertarian approach, while imperfect, minimizes government-corporate collusion and therefore concentration.

            Anyone seeking perfection will not find it anywhere on earth.  By democratizing responsibility, we unleash evil-seeking alternatives and disempower the government-corporate fraternity.  That’s a trade I’m willing to make.  Anyone who thinks government oversight offers greater protection isn’t honestly looking at what all this oversight eventually yields.  It’s a rotten crop of cronyism and corruption.  Give me a bubbly bath of private entities instead, both the good and bad.  Such a society moves individuals to take responsibility and that is the foundation of liberty.

            If everybody purchased like you, what would be the first product to go bankrupt?

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