In the case of food safety, I have a feeling that people would react strongly and negatively should the government fail to fulfil its constitutional duty to promote the general welfare.
When you buy produce, don't you want to know that it was grown by people who practice basic hygiene, and that human waste wasn't used as a fertilizer? How on earth is the free market going to assure that? How would you keep dishonest people from lying about growing conditions, without some means of holding them accountable? How do you, as a customer, know anything about that produce? How would we have known that contaminated cantaloupe was killing people, without the systematic procedures that exist for identifying such incidents? There are reasons there are food safety laws.
Abuse of the General Welfare clause is the most-employed method of unconstitutional expansion of Federal powers.
Abuse of any part of the constitution happens because voters keep electing people who promise goodies in exchange for power. I do not think there is a way to write a constitution that makes it unabusable. It should not be possible for unions to buy politicians, but they do. The problem is the voters.
“How on earth is the free market going to assure that?”
The same way it assures everything else, and infinitely more effeiciently than government. It amazes me how quickly after new frontiers of regulation open up people forget that somehow people got along before. In a few decades they’ll probably wondered how we lived without socialized healthcare and ate without a national food distribution genteel, or didn’t drown in the melted polar ice cap seas without the ban on CO 2.
“Abuse of any part of the constitution happens because voters keep electing people who promise goodies in exchange for power.”
Which is why we are not a democracy and have a Constitution in the first place. It defeats its own purpose to throw up your hands and say, “Oh well, voters screwed it up. Whattya gonna do?” I am under no delusion that the Constitution isn’t dead letter. It hasn’t really been in force for more than 150 years, and hasn’t bothered anyone’s conscience since the New Deal. But that doesn’t mean we have to join in.
Of course you are correct, even though some have chosen to take issue with your statement. I wonder if your detractors were the same folks who blasted government for allowing China to export melamine in food to the US, and not doing more to stop it.
I'll be the first to say that the FDA is a huge, overreaching, and bureaucratic nightmare. I know because I used to deal with them on a regular basis. However, most people don't have a clue what it was like prior to its formation, because they haven't bothered to read about all the deaths and illnesses that occurred from our food supply due to the reasons you cite. The FDA could be a much better organization, but it is a hell of a lot better now than it was before it came into being.
I want safe food, and looking to big government for it is the sure path to failure. It is also unconstitutional.
I shudder to think what else you’d like the government to control.