ONLY CRAZY PEOPLE DRINK RAW MILK?
THE WIDER IMPLICATIONS
AUGUST 5, 2011. The federal raid on Rawesome Foods in Venice, California, is based on the insistence (with guns) that private citizens can’t make contracts with each other to buy and sell raw unpasteurized milk.
Some uninformed types believe the raid was solely focused on the fact that Rawesome doesn’t have a business license. But it is a private club, and the last time I looked, a club doesn’t need a license to carry on its activities.
Do private citizens have the right to form an association, by contract, and then engage in exchange of goods and services, among its members, regardless of the opinion of the State?
Well, if we return to the basic document, the Declaration of Independence, can we interpret the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without understanding that private contracts are fundamental to this pursuit?
In the case of Rawesome, the government believes it can garner wide public support, and therefore it feels confident its prosecution will make no one nervous. Whereas, if the product Rawesome club members were buying and selling was homemade oatmeal, the public might balk and see the intrusion on Rawesome as invasive and quite insane.
Speaking of which, the government is using what I call the The Crazy People Doctrine.
If more than, say, 60% of the American people believe Rawesome is crazy, the government is good to go in court. If that wide majority thinks raw-milk dealing would only be carried out by nutcases, then the whole issue of whether private contracts are inviolate can be set aside and dropped in the trash.
Well, we know government agencies have been warning the public about raw milk for at least 70 years, and claiming that pasteurized milk is wonderful and safe and scientific. So The Crazy People Doctrine seems like a slam-dunk here, regardless of how the specific charges against Rawesome’s owner are eventually worded.
“He’s crazy, who cares whether we (the prosecutors) say he was doing business without a license or was selling a dangerous product or was making a contract he had no right to make.”
And the public will say, “Find him guilty, he’s a whacko. Nobody in his right mind would sell raw milk.”
As usual, I’ll resort to one of my extreme bizarro analogies:
Let’s say eight of us form a private club, and we buy and sell, among ourselves, little gold balls of plant matter which, when ingested, have been shown, invariably, to cause severe one-hour headaches. The balls have been tested, over and over again, and amazingly, the verdict is precise across the board. Eat a gold ball of this plant substance, you get a one-hour headache.
And suppose the eight of us believe this activity of buying and selling and eating the gold balls is part of our pursuit of happiness. We’ll assume responsibility for the headache. Do we have the right to have our club and engage in our activity—or does the government have the legal power to destroy the club and prosecute us on a criminal charge?
The government says, “Gold balls are food products for sale. Therefore, they fall under our jurisdiction when it comes to the issue of safety. Period.”
The public says, “Put these crazies in jail, or in a mental institution, and drug them to the gills.”
Government says, “Citizens have no fundamental and overriding right to make private contracts among themselves. We can intercede at any moment we choose to. Any rule or law we make automatically trumps the so-called right to private contracts.”
If we accept this judgment, then we are admitting that private relationships are a thin illusion that can be swept away without notice.
If you and your friends own a piece of land and build a community vegetable garden there, and then exchange squashes and tomatoes and grapes and cucumbers with one another, from your individual plots, the government can send in a food safety inspector, he can walk on your land, and he can decide whether your vegetables are legal. Your contract with your friends is null and void and without meaning—and always was.
If I call in a friend to fix my car in my garage and he doesn’t have a license to do repairs, he could be arrested or cited with a fine.
If 50 of us form a health club, and buy and sell amino acids among ourselves, and if we happen to have printed a sheet, for internal distribution, claiming these products cure arthritis, the FDA could invade our office, confiscate the products, and charge us with practicing medicine without a license.
And if the public, by and large, believes we are “crazies,” the government feels confident it will escape blowback.
You now, perhaps, see one clear reason for government/media/science propaganda: “creating convenient crazies.”
Take, for instance, the arena of vaccines. If government succeeds in outlawing all claimed parental exemptions from the jabs, based on its own version of good science, how many people will rise up and revolt? Versus how many will say refusing vaccines was always just for Crazy People?
The Crazy People Doctrine, behind the scenes, is the standard of prediction that government employs—and propaganda is the tool it uses to manufacture perception about its targets…
So that the matter of private contracts is tossed into the garbage.
JON RAPPOPORT