The Regime’s War on Food (Updated, July 25)

Enemies of food fascism: Max Kane (left) and Canadian dairy farmer Michael Schmidt

Many thousands of years ago, two men came across a dairy cow, a beast neither had previously beheld. 

One of them, seeking to impress the other, pointed to the creature’s udder and declared: “You see those things dangling from the underside of that animal? Well, I’m going to squeeze one of them and drink whatever comes out of it!”

According to the late and much-missed George Carlin, that nameless daredevil was the bravest man who ever lived. He was also exceptionally fortunate, since he was able to consume raw milk, and even extol its nutritional benefits, without running the risk of imprisonment.

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New target of rights erosions: U.S. citizens

A primary reason Bush and Cheney succeeded in their radical erosion of core liberties is because they focused their assault on non-citizens with foreign-sounding names, casting the appearance that none of what they were doing would ever affect the average American.  There were several exceptions to that tactic — the due-process-free imprisonment of Americans Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, the abuse of the “material witness” statute to detain American Muslims, the eavesdropping on Americans’ communications without warrants — but the vast bulk of the abuses were aimed at non-citizens.  That is now clearly changing.

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Monopoly “Money”

“Everyone knows that the State claims and exercises [a] monopoly of crime … and that it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or alien.” –

Albert Jay Nock, reducing the matter to its undeniable essentials, in his indispensable work Our Enemy, The State.

One of the most enduring tidbits of economic pseudepigrapha is this incontestable statement dubiously attributed to Ludwig von Mises: “Government is the only institution that can take a valuable commodity like paper and make it worthless by applying ink.” The same principle holds true with respect to the debasement of the official coinage.

Owing to the Regime’s relentless debasement of the dollar, pennies and nickels are actually worth more as metal than as U.S. currency. In late 2006, the United States Mint — an agency with no legislative authority — issued a rule forbidding people, on pain of imprisonment, to make economically sensible use of coined “money” they had earned through legitimate commerce.

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