SOCIETAL REMEDIES

            I guess I opened a bit of a Pandora’s Box that interestingly started with a celebration of the Supreme Court’s upholding California’s ban on crated pig sales, re-establishing the supremacy of states’ rights.  

            The arguments that subsequent musings about no EPA and FDA are similar to destroying a car if it has a flat tire and of course the usual impotence of state agencies to handle problems brings us to the deeper question of how to remedy societal wrongs.  Without a doubt, personal experiences play a large role in the remedies we choose.  

            Someone living next to a polluted river that got cleaned up after the EPA was established will inevitably be grateful for the EPA.  Someone harmed by bad food or a bad drug that saw perpetrators brought to justice by the FDA would naturally appreciate such an agency.  Honestly, virtually all of my dealings with government agencies have been unpleasant; hence, my book EVERYTHING I WANT TO DO IS ILLEGAL.  Am I biased?  Absolutely.  Every one of us is biased based on our experiences and historical perceptions cultivated through family, teachers, and acquaintances.

            In any remedy, you have to take things in aggregate.  Life is full of trade-offs and nothing is ever all good or perhaps all bad.  A starving bank robber gets enough to eat another day.  Perhaps nothing brings this into perspective more than Bill Gates’ belief that the only way to save humanity is to kill half the world’s population.  This is generally the belief of the World Economic Forum.  What could you justify doing, morally and ethically, if you believed to be the savior of humanity you had to kill half of it?  Everything would be on the table.

            This is extreme, for sure, but it does speak to the conundrum of remedy.  To have a governmental remedy, 51 percent of the people must be in favor of it.  That means society is already cascading toward a remedy philosophically if not yet practically long before legislation occurs.  In other words, society was disgusted with pollution long before the EPA stepped into the picture.  Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring awakened a sleeping society.  Upton Sinclair’s The Jungleawakened a sleeping public to the atrocities of the big meat packers.

            If working in and around nature every day teaches anything, it is patience.  You can’t train animals in a day.  You can’t get apples from a sapling in a year.  You can’t get grapes from new vines in a year.  You can’t change from summer to winter until the earth’s rotation gets to the other side of the sun.  The terrorist’s agenda, the violent rioter’s agenda, and I would suggest the “we need an agency now” agenda all stem from impatience to let societal awareness bloom into full expression.

            That expression may be exercising the commons.  It may be garnering more support.  Perhaps a boycott (think Civil Rights and Martin Luther King).  But the biggest risk in impatient responses to current problems is that we create things we regret.  Rushing into war.  Rushing into covid jabs.  Rushing into Teddy Roosevelt’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) that eventuated in today’s inability of farmers and neighbors to enjoy food transactions.

            The answer is not “get rid of the corruption.”  The corruption, dear people, is imbedded in the remedy.  If the remedy incentivizes centralized power rather than diversified power (which every Federal agency does) then corruption and cronyism will eventually and inevitably dominate the agency, regardless of initial good intentions and a crusading passion.  The most disempowering notion in anybody’s head is to assume that the only remedy is a federal agency; do you realize how that destroys “we the people?”

            We have not had freedom for so long we can scarcely imagine another way to govern or remedy situations we don’t like.  We’ve been emasculated from our own power.  As a society, we could eliminate factory farming in a day. Look how the market responded to a misplaced ad by Bud Light.  If each of us evangelized as aggressively and passionately for intentional patronage in the marketplace as we do lobbying for salvation by legislation, I suggest we’d be farther along toward remedies than we are.  If all the jet fuel and effort that went into the federal Organic Standards program had gone instead into changing buying habits in the marketplace, who knows how many people would have been converted to buying better food and supporting better farmers?

            Is this perfect?  No.  Is it fast?  No.  Is it decentralized, democratized, and desperately dependent on personal participation and responsibility?  Yes.  Does it empower the broadest number of people?  Yes.  Society is full of dysfunctional and ill-conceived remedies; let’s be willing to call them inappropriate and move to ones framed in liberty, a word I hear too infrequently these days.  Almost every malady can trace its origins to an assault on liberty, from my liberty to enjoy unpolluted commons to my liberty to ingest questionable substances because I own my own body.  Let liberty thrive. Oh, by the way, I’m not taking my earned Medicare, either.

            Have you ever wanted to do something you thought was good and been denied because it violated a federal regulatory agency?  If so, what?