After we slay the gun control dragon, food freedom may end up being my next pet issue. If the Government can control what you eat, any freedom you may think you have is an illusion. Much like having the means to protect one’s own life and liberty, having a freedom to eat foods of one’s own choice is fundamental. We might have to rename the blog “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snowflakes” with a tagline “Or Uncle Sam Will Shoot You.” It’s for your own good, you see.
Now it looks like the ATF is going to make sure everyone knows beer is bad for you, because if they don’t, FDA will, and we can’t have one out of control federal bureaucracy stepping on the turf of another out of control federal bureaucracy now, can we? At least one former inside the beltway blogger thinks that the GOP is utterly powerless to help us in this regard:
A big part of my thinking in coming to DC was to try and help to create a synergy between the Right on-line and the establishment GOP. I had hoped to forestall anything like an insurgency from the Right by finding common ground. What I didn’t realize is that today’s GOP is interested in no such thing. It can’t hear anyone outside the Beltway echo chamber and isn’t interested in listening to them even if they could.
Of course they aren’t interested. They are part of the problem too. As another blogger notes, the only way you can change anything is by getting folks back home fired up — you need a real grassroots movement:
What every Blogger should do, is get to know their local GOP clubs and Central Committees, and if time and distance permits, their County clubs too. Don’t just figure in publicity, but figure out other ways to expand your club (or committee’s) reach. Funds matter.  Knowing your County history and voting numbers also matter. […]
To make the RNC understand Bloggers and Tea Partiers, we have to crack County and State levels first. By the time of Election 2012 and 2014, we will become the establishment.
That’s likely what it’s going to take to change anything. But there is another model other than working through the political parties, and that’s working through single-issue interest groups that help channel grass roots efforts politically — basically the NRA model. That’s one thing the various “food lobby” groups have so far failed to understand. From the Belmont Club:
If sugary drinks become the new cigarettes the American Beverage Association bids fair to become the new Big Tobacco bogeyman. Wikipedia writes: “fighting the creation of soft drink taxes, the American Beverage Association, the largest US trade organization for soft drink bottlers, has spent considerable money to lobby Congress. The Association’s annual lobbying spending rose from about $391,000 to more than $690,000 from 2003 to 2008. And, in the 2010 election cycle, its lobbying grew more than 1000 percent to $8.67 million. These funds are helping to pay for 25 lobbyists at seven different lobbying firms.â€
They can spend all the money they want, but without votes to reward the supporters of food freedom, and punish the food nanny’s, lobbyist aren’t going to help all that much. What’s most likely to happen, realizing the futility, the industry will actively acquiesce to regulation, then realizing it can game the system to entrench the major players at the expense of upstarts, will engage in regulatory capture.
This is not inevitable; we’ve largely saved guns from this fate. We’ve not saved the industry from regulation, but firearms regulation has not, generally, resulted in a contraction of the industry into the hands of a few big players, and to a large degree, manufacturers are still allowed to design and market guns within a fairly broad regulatory framework. That might sound fantastic, but in comparison to the requirement for operating a pharmaceutical company, gun manufacturing is regulatory cake.
The big problem we have is honestly not from the left, but from conservatives and libertarians themselves. The problem is, to make an effect in politics requires collective action — something libertarians are very poor at. Collective is one of those dirty commie words, after all. People on the left are much more willing than libertarians and conservatives to put aside their personal agendas for the sake of the greater good, and for the sake of their cause. That’s why they are very effective at getting Government to do what they want. There’s a certain amount of selfishness that drives libertarian thought, but that becomes a barrier when it comes to convincing people that self-interest can be a good thing for a whole as well. That’s a paradox we’re going to have to figure out if we’re going to beat back leviathan.
