Okay, two government posts in two days. What is the world coming to? Well I didn’t create this situation, I’m just spreading the word…
In scary legal news a Wisconsin judge had gone completely loopy declaring that citizens have no right to eat the foods of their own choice. Not only that but you don’t even have the right to produce your own food! Scared yet?
In response to a request from the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, the judge issued a clarification of his decision last week regarding his assessment of the constitutionality of food rights. The judge expanded on his original statement that such constitutional issues are “wholly without merit.”
He explained that the FTCLDF arguments were “extremely underdeveloped.” As an example, he said the plaintiffs’ use of the Roe v Wade abortion rights case as a precedent does “not explain why a woman’s right to have an abortion translates to a right to consume unpasteurized milk…This court is unwilling to declare that there is a fundamental right to consume the food of one’s choice without first being presented with significantly more developed arguments on both sides of the issue.” Gee, I thought they both had to do with the right to decide what to do with your own body.
As if to show how pissed he was at being questioned, he said his decision translates further that “no, Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to own and use a dairy cow or a dairy herd;
“no, Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to consume the milk from their own cow;”
And in a kind of exclamation point, he added this to his list of no-nos: “no, Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to produce and consume the foods of their choice…”
You have to wonder if maybe even the regulators are getting a tad uncomfortable with the rulings coming from the nation’s judiciary on food rights. Many of these individuals, biased as they are against raw milk, dabble in farming to some extent, or grew up on farms. This judge has gone way beyond what many of them have come to assume–that everyone has the right to own a cow and consume its milk Even in places that ban raw milk sales, there’s nearly always a provision in state law that anyone who owns a cow has the right to consume its milk.
It seems Judge Fiedler is saying it’s not a “fundamental right,” but rather a right granted us by the state.
–The Complete Patient
The original judgement can be seen here. To quote from the main points:
1) no, Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to own and use a dairy cow or a dairy herd;
2) no, Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to consume the milk from their own cow;
3) no, Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to board their cow at the farm of a farmer;
4) no, the Zinniker Plaintiffs’ private contract does not fall outside the scope of the State’s police power;
5) no, Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to produce and consume foods of their choice;
In other words: Put down that carrot and backup slowly. Anything you eat or grow can and will be held against you in a court of law. You have now entered the police state of 1984. Shut up.
Yes, you read that right, our Founding fathers and mothers were cow owning outlaws! Your grandmother, that miscreant, didn’t have the right to raise a Victory Garden! So throw away your moo-doo, hand over those rakes and go buy government authorized highly processed food paste at the store. Imagine the idea that you would raise your own carrots! Shame on you! You’re not doing your part to support the Gross National Product!
Why is this happening?
Simple: Big Ag / Big Corp is scared that small producers are going to take away a little tiny, itty-bitty percentage of their market share. They are using their lobbyist and regulatory minions and henchmen to put the squeeze on small family farms that have found a niche outside the mainstream in order to scare consumers back into buying at the big corporate teats. When that doesn’t work they resort to government raids and insane judicial judgments against the small producers because Big Ag isn’t able to compete on a level playing field even with the help of all the subsidies they get.
What can you do?
Make a stink. Publicize these issues. Write about them on your blogs, web comments, to your representatives and in letters to the newspapers (you know, the crinkly things you fold that has the black ink – still a great tool of free speech as there are plenty of independents left.)
Most of all, support your local small farmers. Fight back with your pocket book. Hurt Big Ag where they feel the pain, in their wallets. Spend your dollars locally and as directly as you can to small stores, restaurants and family farms so that money flows back into your local economy.
Lastly, write your state senators and representatives and ask them to put forth a constitutional amendment that guarantees all people the fundamental right to hunt, grow, produce, own and consume their own food of all forms (animal, vegetable, fruit, cereals, nuts, fungi, etc).
One more thing:
While you’re at it, suggest that all subsidies be eliminated. I mean all of them. Agricultural, steel, petroleum, mortgage, everything. (Got your attention there with that last one, didn’t I!) Subsidies distort the market and inflate the prices of many things while hiding the true costs. You either pay at the counter and pump or you pay in your taxes. Which will it be? The current system is easy for the big wigs with their fancy legal eagles and accounting fancy books to manipulate. What we need is a simple tax system. Throw away the entire tax code and rewrite it on a single 8.5″x11″ sheet of paper in 12 point type with 1″ margins – Something anyone can read and understand. Everybody gets a standard deduction per person. There should be no other deductions, no other ways to game the system. Then everybody then pays a flat tax on all remaining income, wages or capital gains or otherwise. Couple this with a flat national sales tax on all consumer items. Then add the simple rule that the government’s normal budget (not in times of realwar) must be balanced including working at gradually paying down the debt. This is a fair tax, a fair system and it protects the future of our children. It is progressive for the poor due to the personal exemption and everybody pays their share above the poverty line. Simplicity.
You can make a difference. Do it.
Outdoors: 76°F/50°F Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 70°F/65°F
Daily Spark: Rebel without a Clause.
Walter Jeffries Tinker, Tailor… A bit eclectic & a tad eccentric, polymath, quantum mechanic & Farmer. Also lucky at cards.
Wow, tremendous post Walter! When it comes to this type of ruling the wheels have truly come off. Be very interesting to see if and how long it stands. Thank-you!
Walter. Take a deep breath. Exhale. Again, gooood. Suggest that a national ‘fair tax’ would be a lot better than them coming from seventeen directions. Would go into more detail, but you are obviously distressed. Of course, I have been just as distressed for several decades, so I sympathize. I have a column on examiner.com and just got permission to do national or universal articles, as well as local interest stuff. Of course, I’ve been doing that since I started, since Sacramento is California’s capitol and I can disguise a lot of state and federal relation stuff as “local”.
Anything you can provide a link for I can put on examiner. com. And they don’t limit the number of articles I post. Already looking for some way to grab onto the state police action against food sharing and farm sharing arrangements, as cued by your last posting. Need to do some learning, but should be able to link to your blog soon.
You have allies. Capitalism only works to our benefit in a free market, and anything that constricts or directs that market is hurtful. There are a lot of us out here, and we’ve been reading and learning how to do advocacy for a long time. Buck up. Breathe . . .
Don’t worry, I’m breathing fine. I didn’t use the worlds “Fair Tax” or “Flat Tax” because it has gotten negative publicity. The idea is similar. Simplicity.
I usually blog about the nice things that happen on the farm, and dabble a little bit towards politics. I will definitely be linking today’s blog to your site.
This is exactly why I dream of owning a farm. I am choosing to opt-out of all this crap. Unless of course, the consumer protection’s going to come on my farm and start yelling at me about it.
I doubt that judge [sic] ever read the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, our organic document: Art. 2 “And, in the just preservation of rights and property, it is understood and declared, that no law ought ever to be made, or have force in the said territory, that shall, in any manner whatever, interfere with or affect private contracts or engagements, bona fide, and without fraud, previously formed.”
To these judges [sic] they are no Natural rights of man. There are no rights which exist antecedent of government statute. Their statutes are deified.
I’ll dissent from the idea of any type of direct taxation powers of the central federal government. It was prohibited under the Constitution until 1913, and frankly, it hasn’t worked out all that well since then.
Instead, I propose an apportioned tax. Each budget cycle, Disaster-on-the-Potomac figures out what it [thinks it] needs to spend to fulfill its duties to the several States and the People, and then levies the States in proportion to their populations. Free at last, We the People and our businesses are no longer are subject to taxation by the distant, unresponsive central government. (After all, a 15% income tax or flat tax is really just the federal government’s way of saying, “We have claim to ALL of it, but we’re letting you keep most it. This time anyway.”)
The several States, instead of merely being tax dollar *distribution* prefectures of the central government, resume their rightful role as determiners of the role of the central government. It wasn’t even 100 years ago that the several States legislatures sent Senators to Washington to represent the concerns of the States. Now the people elect Senators to add to the clamor and vote themselves largess from the Treasury.
• Central gov’t deficits would be unlawful for any purpose. (But, but, but, but… what if we NEED an emergency war to steal oil from brown people? Well, Uncle Sam will have to raise his army from the states, as per the Constitution. See how far that gets him. I’m confident the People will respond to just wars, just fine.)
• The several States raise the revenues among their citizens and corporations in the manner they see fit to conform to their own advantageous and disadvantageous resources and populations. All of a sudden People will have to start paying attention to the character of those sent to their Capitols.
• The central gov’t has no need for a IRS. Just two clerks in West Virginia to rotate their generous vacations and send out collection notices to the 57 states. Even our Treasury Secretary wouldn’t sweat TurboTax.
• The state bureaucracies, instead of focusing on ways to lard up on skimmed-and-redistributed federal tax dollars, now gets stuck with collecting for the check at the end of the party. With whatever creative energies they can muster, I expect the states will demand duties and functions be returned to the states to be done cheaper. As it stands now, states has zero incentive to attempt to restrain FedCentGov spending.
• States with educational systems which disgorge low-skill, low-wage people get the same *per capita* bill from FedCentGov as other states. Suddenly “No Child Left Behind” is exposed as a canard, and our creative educational reforms will have positive financial consequences. The decennial census no longer is a race to overstate.
• The sheer absurdity of the FedCentGov spending ~$11,500 **each year**per person** (or $57,500 for a family of five) is apparent, especially compared to the median full time wage of ~$39,000.
• TANSTAAFL. We’d better re-learn that lesson quickly.
Regards & Godspeed,
Brian Heyer, CPA
Greenville, Wisc.
Treasurer, Republican Liberty Caucus of Wisc.
(I mention RLC just to provide a glimmer of hope to some.)
Things like this make my stomach churn. I am hoping for the beginning to a return to sanity in about a year!
Walter, I agree with everything you said. However, after reading the judgement, I think the proper fight is to change Wis Stat 97.24(2) to allow the sale of unpasturized milk and milk products. This boarding cows, and owning a share of a cow, is just getting around the system. Let’s change the law. Consumers will then have the option to buy either pasturized or unpasturized milk products. The market will speak and reward the better product, which ever it is.
Actually, we need to go a lot further. This is currently a raw milk issue but we need to protect our right to all types of food production. We need to weed out bad restrictive laws that ban raw milk while simultaneously implementing a Constitutional amendment at the federal and state levels that guarantees us the explicit rights to produce and consume the foods of our own choice. Our bodies, ourselves.
Walter, the Spark is delightful and so sadly true, at least the way I read it. Big Ag has all the Clauses. We pay the freight. In so many ways.
I may have it all wrong from how you wrote it. May your building project be blessed by Indian Summer!
*grin* I wrote that spark quite a while ago. It was simply a play on words and I’ve been holding it waiting for something that it seemed worth of. This post seemed like a candidate. Glad you enjoyed it. We’re loving the warm fall weather.
This is unbelievable….but NOT!
This is pure CODEX ALIMENTARIUS!!! (from the UN).
We are experiencing incremental tyranny….a true police state!
Something you might find interesting, as a foundational reason behind such decisions: I was listening to Alex Jones (Infowars) interview a guy named Alfred Adask. This man got caught up as a defendant in a Texas court case under charges of the crime of being involved in a colloidal silver business. Long story short, he went deep into legal research and figured out where the TX Supreme Court was getting its “authority to prosecute him and others” in said case. He was reading the state’s definition of “drug”, and he discovered the phrase “man and all other animals” more than once in the legal statute. He then argued against the state that his religious liberties were being violated because according to his faith (Christian), a human is created in God’s image and therefore cannot be defined as an animal that has no natural rights! He won on those merits! I wonder what obscure legal definitions would be applicable in helping to fight for our food freedoms?
This is the basis for Agenda 21 (sustainable development) and Codex Alimentarius: ZERO private property rights or natural law freedoms. Maybe these things are based on the concept that we are simply animals, or chattle, to the state.
I am very sad for our country….so much tyranny, so much evil and corruption. I will pray and do what I can. Thanks for posting this!
[I have changed your name to protect your identity. Web servers log IP addresses, computer ID info and stuff like that. Be cautious. -WJ]
And how soon until they take away our right to reproduce. After all, having babies puts a burden on the system. They justify the taking away of our rights to eat what we want because if we eat soda it makes us less healthy so that increases health care costs. Once they take away the right to have children only the rich and powerful will get to have kids. So who is going to mow their lawns and work in their factories? Immigrants? They work cheaper. Have we found the real reason?????
Shut up and eat your Soylent Green!
For anyone who’s not familiar with the reference see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_green
Walter,
You mind if I repost this to my blog? Thanks for the great info
Feel free to repost. Just provide a clickable link back to here. Cheers, -WJ
What a shame that our sham government is coming to this. Pickup those pitch forks.
Better be careful. You are all beginning to sound like you believe that you are the sole owner of yourselves. There is a word for that, you know. Libertarian. Of course the guys in the court house won’t like that much when they hear about it either.
Wow. Truly unbelievable. I watched Food Inc and was pretty shocked and angered by it even though I’m a UK citizen.
This goes totally beyond belief. Everyone who is fighting this sort of thing are true heroes.