End the War on Freedom

FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED FEB. 4, 2002
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Hey Mustafa, try this

Under our U.S. Constitution, schooling and the nutrition of children remain local concerns. Article I, Section 8, which lists all the powers of the U.S. Congress, empowers that body to spend no federal money whatsoever meddling in the feeding or education of schoolkids.

Nor is any power granted to meddle in agriculture, either supporting the prices of farm products, or telling American farmers what or how much to grow, or what to do with it.

Then, just to make sure everyone "got it" when the Founders talked about "a government of powers sharply limited, and specifically enumerated," they went ahead and added the 10th Amendment, which specifies "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

So where on earth did anyone get the idea that the U.S. Department of Agriculture can appropriately busy itself slipping prunes into schoolkids' hamburgers?

Not to keep anyone on tenterhooks, there actually is an answer: Anyone who wants to go look it up can find such a concept detailed in the 1932 presidential platform of one of America's well-known political parties, which called in that Depression year for "immediate governmental relief of the unemployed by the extension of all public works," for "an increase of taxation on high income levels, of corporation taxes and inheritance taxes, the proceeds to be used for old-age pensions and other social insurance," and, more directly to the point for today's discussion, for "agricultural relief," including "insurance against losses due to adverse weather conditions," and other government interventions designed to stabilize farm prices.

Most Americans today understand that it was the incoming Democrats, led by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, put such measures into effect during the depths of the Great Depression ... though it's hardly likely that such big-government pioneers could have foreseen Wednesday's news, that the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service -- under pressure from farm-state congressmen to bolster produce prices by buying up more "surplus" cranberries and prunes -- Tuesday supervised the feeding to 20 inner-city kids at the Van Ness Elementary School in the District of Columbia a new variety of hamburger containing considerable soy meal and "4 percent prune puree."

The prunes replace some of the moisture content lost in the 40-percent-less-fat patties, which were "flame-broiled by the processor to give them a grilled flavor," Agriculture officials explained.

The government is also experimenting with sweet potato pancakes and a raisin-tomato barbecue dip for chicken nuggets, The Associated Press reveals. "What we're really trying to do is find new uses for the products we've been purchasing," explained Robert Keeney of the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service.

So much for the old nostrum that Agriculture's motivation here is to feed the starving. Rather, Agriculture quite unabashedly buys up all this stuff to prop up farm prices -- which means these inner-city kids' moms pay higher prices at the grocery store, about as "regressive" a government program as could be imagined -- whereupon the poor bureaucrats are then stuck trying to figure out ways to render the stuff palatable enough to give away.

Tuesday's verdict? "The hamburger was good," commented federal guinea pig Mustafa Mattocks, 12. "It tasted like a grilled burger."

Thank heavens. The federals are already paying California growers to dig up and destroy 20,000 acres of prune -- pardon me, "dried plum" -- trees. It's hard to imagine what else they could do, other than ... you know ... let prices fall, or something.

John Lund, a USDA official who oversaw the taste tests, said he sees no reason why schools would have to disclose what they're now putting in the burgers -- a revelation which could single-handedly bring back prayer in schools, depending on what new commodities Agriculture finds itself buying up next year.

A glut of peat moss at the garden supply stores? Hey Mustafa, try this. No? How about with a little raisin barbecue sauce? Mm-mmm.

Oh, by the way, that 1932 presidential platform that introduced the idea of federal farm price supports? That wasn't Mr. Roosevelt's own victorious Democratic platform, you understand, which called for a "drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing useless commissions and offices," as well as "the removal of government from all fields of private enterprise except where necessary to develop public works."

No, that 1932 platform we quoted above is the one that Roosevelt and the Democrats reviled as "fantastic and un-American" back in 1932 -- the presidential platform of Socialist Norman Thomas.

---

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter at Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503 -- or dialing 775-348-8591, where information on his next book, "The Ballad of Carl Drega," is also available.

---

Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken