Do you think this is a joke? No joke. U.S. and Canadian governments are raiding farmers for distrubuting raw milk. Raids which mirror drug war raids. Yet another clear indication that our government has far too much money and has grown far too powerful.

In Ontario

Two officers had even infiltrated the farmer’s inner circle, obtaining for themselves samples of his product. Lab tests confirmed their suspicions. It was raw milk. The unpasteurized stuff. Now the time had come to take him down.

Schmidt had risen that morning at 4 a.m. He milked his cows and ate breakfast. He loaded up a delivery, then fired up the bus. But as he reached the end of the driveway, two cars moved in to block his path. A police officer stepped into the road and raised his hand. Another ran to the bus and banged on the door. Others were close behind. Eventually twenty-four officers from five different agencies would search the farm. Many of them carried guns.

“The farm basically flooded, from everywhere came these people,” Schmidt later told me in his lilting German accent. “It looked like the Russian army coming, all these men with earflap hats.”

In Michigan

In October 2006, Michigan officials destroyed a truckload of Richard Hebron’s unpasteurized dairy.

In Ohio

The previous month, the Ohio Department of Agriculture shut down Carol Schmitmeyer’s farm for selling raw milk. Cincinnati cops also swooped in to stop Gary Oaks in March 2006 as he unloaded raw milk in the parking lot of a local church. When bewildered residents gathered around, an officer told them to step away from “the white liquid substance.” The previous September an undercover agent in Ohio asked Amish dairyman Arlie Stutzman for a jug of unpasteurized milk. Stutzman refused payment, but when the agent offered to leave a donation instead, the farmer said he could give whatever he thought was fair. Busted.

Read the rest at Harpers magazine.

The raid and seizure of over 400 children from a Polygamist cult in Texas got me thinking.  First let me say that I do not condone the beliefs or actions of these cult members. I simply want to share some thoughts these events have triggered and I’d like your comments.

1. I was unaware that child protective services could seize children from their parents without evidence of abuse. If what I understand about this case is accurate, the government received an anonymous call from a female claiming to be a 16 year old victim of this cult. It now appears this call was fraudulent. A single unsubstantiated call gave the government probable cause to seize over 400 children from over 100 families. I must restate… I don’t like this cult… but regardless of that… does this mean that a single unsubstantiated anonymous phone call could lead the government to seize your children? Doesn’t that seem wrong to you? Shouldn’t the burden of evidence be upon the state? Shouldn’t there be some proof?
   
2. These mothers were not legally married to the men who fathered their children, so technically they were single mothers who drew welfare benefits from the State of Texas. It also appears that no one in this cult was employed in the traditional sense. So the taxpayers of Texas have been funding this cult for years? Isn’t this a case of the state creating (or at least perpetuating) the problem? Wouldn’t this cult have gone bust without government funding? Instead of using police force, why not cut off funding? Or prosecute them for welfare fraud?
   
3. One more time… I don’t condone polygamous marriages, but I must ask an important question. In our modern “loose” society, how can we criminalize this behavior? For example, I’ve met unmarried men who have three children from three different women. I’ve also met women who have three children from three different men. Why is it legal for some people to behave this way and illegal for others? It’s illegal if you have multiple sex partners as a matter of religious principle, but legal if you do it as a matter of casual promiscuity. Doesn’t that seem horribly inconsistent? Wilt Chamberlain claims to have had sex with 20,000 women, yet if he married two of them at the same time, even with their knowledge and consent, he’d be a criminal. So you can legally have casual sexual relations with as many people as you wish but if you make a commitment to more than one of them, you’re a felon? Can anyone explain this? I sure can’t.

I learned about this case listening to Ian and Mark at Free Talk Live who are being attacked for asking similar questions. I’m glad they are there. Someone needs to ask tough questions, even about weirdos.

Update:

As I expected, I have gotten some serious hate mail and I am being attacked in social media because of this post. I guess that’s what happens when people perceive you to be defending the indefensible. I am not defending these people. I am questioning the actions of the state. There is a difference you know.

I want to point out to those of you who think I am nuts, that right here in Minnesota we have two major immigrant populations who practice widespread polygamy and child marriage. So I ask you who are insulting me, should Minnesota CPS also remove all the children en mass from all the homes of these immigrants based upon their cultural and religious practices? Or would it be better to treat it on a case by case basis like we do now? I prefer case by case because it passes constitutional muster.

Is immigration the ticket to a new age of peace and prosperity like so many free market libertarians tout?

Is immigration the answer to our falling birth rates? Is it the best way to keep our youth competitive in the global marketplace? Is it the path to economic growth and continued freedom?

Or like many paleoconservatives claim, is it the road to national and cultural ruin? The end of liberty as we know it?

Or as many environmentalists say, is population reduction part of the answer to our environmental problems? To energy scarcity? To suburbanization of the hinterlands? Are too many people the problem?

Or will these arguments be proven to be an alarmist fraud, like the 1968 book “The Population Bomb” where Paul Erlichman wrote, “the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 years by 1980 because of pesticide usage, and the nation’s population would drop to 22.6 million by 1999 ^[1].

For some reason people love to believe everything is going to hell, but I am skeptical about predictions of cultural collapse and massive eco-disasters, because there have been so many chicken little warnings in the last century, and not one has come to pass. I am even more skeptical of these catastrophic predictions when the only solutions are higher taxes, protectionism, increased police power, and more government regulations.

However, I don’t claim to have a crystal ball, and I will make no predictions in this post. But in our lifetime (the next 40-60 years) we will find out who was right, the warnings of alarmists or the optimism of libertarians.

Japan’s population is declining and they refuse all immigration for protectionist reasons. We will clearly see what happens to their economy and society. To a lesser extent, we will see the same in Russia and most of Europe. And for the first time, without war or natural disaster, we will see the rapid depopulation of major economic powers.

On the flip side, the U.S., Australia, U.K., Ireland, and Canada have liberal immigration policies which are unlikely to change soon. So we will see the populations of these countries explode. Some predictions show the US having over a billion people in less than 100 years.

I tend to favor liberal immigration policies, if the folks seeking our way of life embrace the idea of individual liberty and freedom and if they are here to build a better life and not to get a handout. Most of the complaints I hear about immigration in America are really complaints about our social welfare system. People complain that immigrants are draining our school system and our social services. Which leaves me asking the complainers…

Have you considered the possibility that immigrants aren’t the problem, but instead, that our school system and our social services are? It isn’t just immigrants who drain these systems. Have you considered the possibility that large swaths of humanity do not value things which are ‘free?’ If people had to pay for education and it was voluntary not compulsory, don’t you think they would value it more? There is little we could or should do about people desiring the freedom our nation provides, but there is much we can do about giving away ‘freebies.’

But I digress.

We live in fascinating times, and I am optimistic about our future. And I can’t wait to see our world evolve.

What do you think about these topics?

Sound off.

Irrational fear fuels ALL of our Nanny State legislation, irrational fear of highly unlikely events, events which do happen, but were an acceptable part of life a decade or two ago. Our nation which was founded by risk takers is fast becoming a risk averse nation. The Nanny State is fueled by people who want to prosecute others for taking the most minuscule calculated risks. Paranoid Nanny Staters are calling for the prosecution of New York Sun Columnist Lenore Skenazy who allowed her 9-year-old to ride the subway home alone. She is being attacked for publicly stating that building confident independent children is more important than risk avoidance. Oh the heresy! I don’t know if I’d have the courage and faith to do what she did, but I do know I was allowed this measure of independence when I was 9 and so was every other American kid. Paranoid Nanny Staters say things are different today. It’s far more dangerous. There are more perverts and weirdos than ever. But as Lanore highlights in her column, it is the exact inverse, things are far safer than the 70s and 80s, and abductions are decreasing every year.

From the article:

“The statistics show that this (child abduction) is an incredibly rare event, and you can’t protect people from very rare events. It would be like trying to create a shield against being struck by lightning.”

In another ray of hope - Charges were dropped against Treffly Coyne the suburban mother charged with child neglect for leaving a sleeping two-year-old in a locked car and steeping thirty feet away for less than a minute. But I still find it disturbing that the police arrested her for this. How humiliating. Have the police lost all common sense? When I was a kid, cops didn’t enforce trivial laws, but instead, as members of our community, they made sensible judgements about each situation individually. It almost seems like these young cops are brainwashed. The old-school ones are much more compassionate and intelligent. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I miss cops like Tony Bouza. I don’t agree with everything he said, but a least he was thinking for himself and not acting like a brain dead zombie. Zero tolerance rules are for robots, not human beings. Human beings have the God given ability to reason. We can understand that everything is not black and white, that every situation is unique and filled with nuance. A free society should reflect our individual ability to reason and judge.

There are those among us who believe individuals cannot be trusted to judge risk, and must be forced under threat of prosecution to avoid risk.
But that brings other questions to mind…

If individuals can’t be trusted to make their own decisions, why should we trust individuals in government to make these decisions? Are they somehow better than us? Smarter than us? It appears they think so.

It frightens me that there are ‘educated licensed’ professionals who try to justify this abuse of children. Reasonable sane people would never do this to begin with. Honest ethical people would admit their overreaction and apologize. I can’t write another word… or I think I’ll explode…