You can eat whatever you want--if you want to eat raw nightshade berries picked fresh from your garden, you can do so. The FDA and USDA, however, will prevent you from selling them as a health food. Their job is to make sure that food products offered for sale meet a certain level of safety requirements.
Second, it leads to a government that is willing to kill people who are selling unapproved vitamins or raw milk. Well, government doesn’t really intend to kill them, but during raids by machine-gun equipped SWAT troops, accidents can happen.
Wow, talk about hyperbole.
Although I can't say I see anything wrong with sending someone who intentially sells unsafe contaminated products in wilful disregard of safety and health regulations to prison.
Third, it protects commercial interests who are favored by that same gun-wielding bureaucracy via regulatory capture.
Huh? Do you mean those commercial interests like the local farmers and ranchers who comply with local, state, and federal laws and sell their products at local farms and markets? Is there any reason they *shouldn't* be protected?
Fourth, it leads to false claims of harmless substances when the bureaucracy that enforces its monopoly on competence tells us that there is nothing to worry about, we should just move on with our lives, when in fact a real hazard exists.
Please tell me, what is the "real hazard"? Am I to presume, because of the nature of the articles you linked, that the scientific assessment that it is not necessary to test west coast fish for radioactive contamination from a plant several thousands of miles away somehow adds up to a "real hazard" being ignored?
Sixth: this bureaucracy becomes self-serving. Companies that work within the system and are cooperative with it get protection. For example, the CDC estimates that in 2011 contaminated food caused approximately 47.8 million illnesses, over 127,800 hospital admissions and over 3,000 deaths.
So, companies that practice Good Manufacturing Processes to ensure that their products are safe to consume are "protected" by the system (by which I assume you mean they aren't being shut down)? Why is that a problem? With so many foodborne illnesses, it doesn't make sense to argue for more lax standards.
One solution is for government to set standards based on sound science and prudent practices but to limit its power to simply requiring labeling as to how well a product complies with the standard. We don’t have to threaten people with machine guns (and risk actually killing them) in order to stop their ability to sell to the public.
The people making the regulations *are* scientists, working with the most comprehensive and current scientific data available. I don't see a problem with it. OTOH, restricting regulatory authority to simply requiring labeling of products while allowing anyone to sell anything won't protect anyone. So what if half the dairy cattle at that farm have tuberculosis and the other half carry E. coli H157O7--the raw milk they're selling at their unrefrigerated roadside stand is clearly labeled "Raw milk--may contain pathogens", so it's okay! And no one can sue them, either, since their label meets legal requirements! Oy.
Some of these 'scientists' are working for competing pharma's. $$$$$$$$
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You can eat whatever you want—if you want to eat raw nightshade berries picked fresh from your garden, you can do so.
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Oh, if this were only true, but sadly it is not. If I find pot on my property, it is against the law for me to smoke it, not that I want to. If I find magic mushrooms it is against the law for me to eat them, again not that I want to or would suggest it a good idea for anyone else do eat them.
The French economist Bastiat told us that economics is about the totality of the effects of an action, both the seen and the unseen. Further, people who love big and bigger government never think that their beloved bureaucracies could ever be banal, incompetent, hard-headed, biased or just plain wrong. They always attribute only selflessness and a clean-hearted desire to carry out the law that is only meant for our common well-being. We give them guns to make sure their decrees are carried out but they would never use them wrongly.
I am tempted to claim that liability issues have been far more effective in improving the safety of food and medical products than any government action. But if the example of Jack in the Box’s contaminated beef is of no interest then you would not care to consider any other references that I might provide to back this claim up. I am not fooled by the facade and mirage of competence of any government agency. I do not waive any of my unalienable rights when it comes to the sovereignty of my own body. And thanks to the net I have just as much access to the latest research as any government bureaucrat does.
In my youth, it was not uncommon to hear the rejoinder, “its a free country”. I no longer hear that any more because it is not a free country. My father in law died to preserve his granddaughter’s freedom. If he could see the Leviathan State today, I am not sure he would volunteer for that duty again.