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.

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.

Too many people - even smart people - believe the only way to change something is by passing a new law. At the core of all law enforcement is coercion and force. Go ahead and tell a police officer you aren’t going to comply with the law and you’ll see what I mean (I’m kidding - don’t try it - I’m just trying to make a point). As a nation, we’ve either forgotten what can happen when a law is enforced, or we don’t care. This is an example of how some of us are willing to use the force of law to end the simplest of disagreements.

Last summer I was talking to my neighbor about youth baseball, when I asked, “Did you see that New York City passed a law banning aluminum bats in youth baseball games. Isn’t that outrageous?”

My neighbor is a smart successful small businessman. He’s a hunter and a lifelong Republican and I love having him as a neighbor and a friend. But I am going to use his quote to make a point.

He replied, “I’m with ‘em on that one. There should be a law here too. Aluminium bats are dangerous. The ball comes off the bat too fast.”

I don’t have an opinion about the safety of the bats. I don’t know enough about it. I know people have reasonable opinions on both sides of the issue.

But I do have an opinion about laws like these.

Youth baseball leagues have governing boards which set the rules of the game. The government shouldn’t set the rules, the league members should set the rules. So if you want aluminum bats removed from your youth baseball league, petition the youth baseball association and not the government. There is no need for the government to regulate the rules in youth sports, we are capable of doing that privately.

Or are we incapable of resolving an issue as simple as baseball rules without government? Is that what we’ve become as a free society?

A law like this shows a lack of respect for the rule of law itself and for free society. When laws like this are enforced, they make a mockery of real law enforcement.