Do You Have A Right To You Own Food?
It is so absurd to even ask. Yet, there are slow, steady efforts to make eating your own food of your labor on your land illegal.
Because, of course, your government overlords-remember these are the people who won the election-know better than you for you about you. If there is any question about what you should be doing, your legislators know the answer.
Doubt me? Just ask.
Updates
1.11.19
Tennessee Lawmakers Seek to Criminalize Drinking Fresh Milk
5.31.18
Update: The thug squad is at it again (still), dumping out gallons and gallons of wholesome raw milk. Here’s a link to that story. Very disturbing.
[amazon_link asins=’B001YQEZ9G’ template=’ProductCarousel’ store=’us-1′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’c9f222a6-6553-11e8-bc34-39af293ae750′]
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Food Rights, commentary and a review.
My appearance on the Sherry Voluntary podcast.
http://bit.ly/DannOnSherryVoluntary
Rights. Who has them?
Do you have a right to food? To water? A need almost certainly but not a right.
Calling something a right then barking that the right has been taken away is a very effective tool for getting attention. Do you have a right to shoelaces or neck ties?
My interest in this book, and the topic, is deciphering the needs wants of the people to have and buy the food they wish and the wants of the government to get in-between you and the producer.
Some good, some not
The principle flaw I see with the book is the assumption that food is a right. David E Gumpert writes mostly as the third party narrator sharing events between vendors, producers and customers and the tangles these three groups have with the law, local, state and FDA. I can think of no one who would say no one should be denied choosing one gas station of any other, but to be able to fill your car with the gas of your choice is not a right. To purchase is not a right. It seems that that word is used just to get attention and create alarm. The overstepping of the government into the private affairs of the people is alarming enough. Calling something a right which isn’t a right seems to detract from the significance of the issue.
The government, in the form of the FDA, does a very good job of interfering with the production, distribution and sale of foods, from raw milk to un-inspected meats. Inspected, of course, by the government, in this case known as the USDA.
In a long series of events the FDA has obtained seemingly carte blanche to act on it’s own. Robert Higgs, in his book Against Leviathan, writes of the FDA and their action in the medical world, “the FDA serves, in sense, as a central planner in the quality-assurance sector of the medical good economy. The agency imposes a body of rigid, one-size-fits-all rules, binding on everyone regardless of the actual individual differences of people’s medical condition, personal preferences, and attitudes toward bearing risk.” Under no circumstances, in medicine or food, may you have an option or preference which is not already determined for you and meets the approval, literally and figuratively, of the overlords.
Is there an alternative?
From a libertarian perspective, people ought to be allowed to do as they wish. The government ought not get in the way. Yet, they do, and when they do it can be horrible. So much food, good, wholesome food absent an ink stamp, is destroyed for lacking only that stamp.
This is a big issue and one well worth learning more about. I’ll be speaking with Sherry Voluntary on her podcast about this topic, and more, as well as writing more about this.
The answer to the question is no, you do not have a right to food. With this caveat. If you grow the food with your labor on your land, then you have a right to that food.
What makes the food issue so thorny is it’s food. If it were shoelaces, the emotional impact would be nearly 0. But, you do not have a right to the property of someone else. You may engage that person in voluntary exchange, barter or purchase, but you may not just take.
Not cut and dried
I will admit that was a tough hurdle for me to cross. My own limits centered around a misunderstanding of what rights are. And, because it is food and not shoelaces, many people will have an opinion about that answer. “Well, you just want people to die!” or some such response. No. No one-if I need to clarify, no one of sufficient reason-wants people to do. But, we don’t want rampant thievery either. To assume as guess, what most people want to to be free to make a choice without the choices being made ahead of time. When the government interferes with the production and distribution of anything, you don’t really have a free choice, you can just pick from what’s been picked for you.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Food Rights is well worth the read, of only to discover at least one judge in America thinks that you do not have a right to the food produced by another, you don’t have a right to food you produce. Gumpert did an impressive job organizing and sifting through thousands of pages of documents to write a readable, interesting, and informative book about who really makes the decisions for you and why that is not a good thing.
