Free Soil, Free Men, Free Milk
I attended a state legislative hearing on Wednesday of last week in Eau Claire that dealt with the sale of raw milk in Wisconsin. It attracted an overflow crowd that quickly packed the small auditorium of Chippewa Valley Technical College and forced many who attended to watch in nearby classrooms on close-circuit television. What I saw among the nearly 500 or so persons who registered their attendance (not including children and there were enough young children there to start a nursery) was, I believe, an example of the “freedom coalition” that Ron Paul talks about in person, live and close up.
If you take a look at the photo in the story provided with the previous link, you’ll see people wearing white, paper milk hats with the words “Freedom” and “Milk” scrawled on them. Lot of people were wearing them. And of the people there in favor of raw milk sales, what a site to behold: organic farmer hippies with dreadlocks and pierced noses sitting next to rock-ribbed, Republican farmer Oles and Lenas. Amish men in straw hats and Mennonite women wearing their full-length dresses and white headscarves there too. Raw milk drinkers from Madison were there and so were small farmers like the Wayne Brunner family, whose farm Mid-Valley Vu, is near my hometown of Arkansaw and is the epicenter of this debate. But regardless of who they were or what they were, they all came together for one cause, the freedom to responsibly sell a product they produce to customers who wish to buy it. It was a beautiful thing.
Raw milk is basically unpasteurized milk. Farm families have drank such milk for years and would sell it to customers through cow-boarding or farm-share arrangements even though the practice was technically illegal. State Ag officials in the past basically looked the other way. That was until now when officials decided to crack down on the practice threatening the livelihood of small farmers like Brunner. This prompted several bills in the legislature to be written and a state taskforce has been set up to look into the issue. Drinking such milk may or may not cause health problems. Some drink it because it “does a body good” to coin a phrase or like the taste. 25 states and many counties in Europe allow such sales. Regardless of why, do they not have the right to drink it if they are aware of potential health risks?, especially if it’s sold by licensed farms on one-to-one basis. Is this not what a free market is about?
And yet who stands in opposition? Government bureaucrats and the big farmer, big agribusiness dominated Farm Bureau. One wishes to regulate behavior and the other wishes to regulate out of existence a product that may cut in on their business. A state ag department that doesn’t have enough inspectors to monitor large farm operations and the manure finds it does have personnel to go after the little guy and his tank of raw milk on his small farm.
If there is such a thing as a “freedom movement” it showed itself Wednesday in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. If freedom brings people together of divergent backgrounds for common cause, it also clearly shows who their opponents are.
Justin Raimondo says that cosmopolitan libertarians on the coast don’t like Ron Paul because of his populism. Yet how can libertarianism advance without it? Without the citizen falsely accused by the prosecution-centric legal system or the fellow pushed around by the TSA official at the airport, or the immigrant hair-dresser denied a license for her beauty shop by city hall without a little “pay-to-play” or the small farmer fuming at all the subsidies his neighbor gets? A libertarianism that only caters to behavioral needs of its elites isn’t much of a movement. Likewise, what kind of conservatism supports the forces of bigness that uproot and scatter whole communities, churches and small businesses it should depend upon through its collusion with government ? Not one I wish to identify with.
This is the alliance of the elites in government, business and culture to push out those who they believe stand in their way. It was this alliance that Robert La Follette opposed when he began his career and the movement he helped to create, the early Progressives, came together to rescue government from such collusion. I know which side “Fighting Bob” would take in this dispute.
I leave the farmer’s market scene completely alone, because it’s not worth it for me to spend the time on it right now, but raw milk might make me reconsider. At 13, I got a summer job working for a farmer, and I still remember how tasty the raw, warm, whole milk he brought in from the milkhouse was. Their family was just about the healthiest group of people you can imagine, too; I think it was due to sweat and sunlight all day and big glasses of whole raw milk whenever they went in the house.
Also, not only is this the sort of thing Ron Paul would get behind, it’s one of his real-life pet issues. He really is the sanest man in DC!
Tea with milk parties?
It is like I have been saying all along, Freedom brings everyone togeather, The problem is some people in this country have forgotton that we are ALL Americans, Leave the
Hyphen’s behind! Does not matter, What Color, What Religion, What Sex, We all love our Children, and if we can
agree on that, We can agree on other things! Let Freedom Ring!
Ron Paul 2012
Milk parties, anyone?…
Sean Scallon posts at The American Conservative about his experience at an Eau Claire, Wisconson hearing dealing with the sale of raw milk in the state: [O]f the people there in favor of raw milk sales, what a site to behold: organic farmer hippies wit…
“But regardless of who they were or what they were, they all came together for one cause, the freedom to responsibly sell a product they produce to customers who wish to buy it.”
This is the precise heart of the matter. Someone wants to sell something; someone else wants to buy it. Both parties assume responsibility for themselves. This is freedom in action.
I just want to be able to buy raw-milk Époisses de Bourgogne and Brie de Meaux.
Of course, if the purpose of the meeting was to get rid of price controls and subsidies on milk, the same cast would have been there, with torches and pitchforks.
It’s amazin’ how the same people can be so libertarian when it is in their interest, and so statist when it is in their interest. Ole, Lena, and Hippie are simply seeking to change the rules in their favor. It’s as American as violence.
I think you’ll find Ebenezer that farmers that benefit the most from subsidies and low-interest loans are the biggest ones in the county.
We’ve been subsidizing U.S. Agriculture since 1933 and yet continue to lose small farms? Do you think that’s a coincidence? I don’t. Subsidize something and you get more of. Produce surplus farm stuffs and prices go down, forcing farmers out of business except those big enough to absorb the difference in price. Coincidence?
[...] Elsewhere, Sean Scanlon reports of the overwhelming response to efforts in Wisconsin to permit the sale of “raw milk,” that is, milk that has not been processed with methods of Pasteurization and Homogenization (these two processes, in a nutshell, might be seen as representing modernity itself – a process of killing off what we regard to be harmful in nature without awareness of destruction we do to nature and to ourselves, and the effort to reduce natural diversity to a homogenous, standardized and predictable mass. At his lecture at Georgetown two weeks ago, farmer Joel Salatin had choice words about Pasteur and his indiscriminate hatred of germs, and the modern avoidance of thinking holistically of ways that we could strengthen the human organism rather than simply trying to kill off germs.). Scanlon writes of a fascinating coalition of “organic farmer hippies with dreadlocks and pierced noses sitting next to rock-ribbed, Republican farmer Oles and Lenas” – what we’d like to think is a kind of “Front Porch” coalition that is gaining traction in light of the bankruptcy of today’s Left and Right. [...]
[...] coalition that supports raw milk which I had written about “Free Soil, Free Men, Free Milk” predominates in the western part of the state where I live. Nearly 800 or so pro-raw milk activists [...]