Marketplace of Ideas Blog

Last week was a remarkable week for those whose cynicism about government is as deep as mine is. It seemed as though just when you thought something more idiotic could not be devised in Washington or Madison, you were proven wrong.

It began Tuesday with this ESPN.com report that the Obama administration was finishing up a “marine spatial planning” report that “could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.”

I am unaware of any part of the U.S. Constitution that gives the federal government authority over fishing anywhere, but particularly for waters within the boundaries of a state (for instance, the Fox River and Wolf River). Apparently federal employees and environmentalists believe the 10th Amendment is nothing but chicken scratches on parchment.

ESPN.com later decided that there was too much commentary in a piece that was not labeled as commentary. Regardless of ESPN.com’s editorial judgment, it is an irrefutable fact that anti-fishing and anti-hunting organizations are in bed with the Obama administration. And as I²ve argued here before, when you vote for a presidential candidate, you get all of his or her supporters and hangers-on too.

My assertion about the Obama administration and the animals-are-people-too types similarly seems to apply to the Doyle administration. The Department of Natural Resources sent out another batch of news releases last week announcing more land purchases with state funds that will eliminate (1) property tax collections on those lands and (2) any activity that involves motorized vehicles or weapons. With $86 million of our tax dollars every year, by the way.

Related to that is the wave of air pollution advisories issued by the DNR last week, the result of immobile air masses. Other than the fog I had to drive through much of last week (my wife described a particularly interesting on-ramp experience as like “driving into the abyss”), most people might consider above-normal temperatures to be pleasant.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Patrick McIlheran points out that pollution is, well, self-defined:

The fascinating bit out of Journal Sentinel story, however, is just how dirty our air is. How dirty? Milwaukee hit the nightmare level of befoulment of 54.6 micrograms of soot, or particulates, as they’re called, per cubic meter of air.

In 2006, this would have been considered clean — no problem at all. Then that year, the EPA cranked down the limit on particulates from 65 micrograms to 35. In the 1990s, the limit was 80 micrograms, so by the standards of the Clinton era, today would be the epitome of fresh air.

The EPA does this regularly for all sorts of pollutants, claiming, as it does with soot, that science has decreed it a rock-solid certainty that what once was clean is now horrible. Understandings are refined routinely, of course, but it seems always that on this topic, science is finding that some substance or other is worse than we thought. Never do we learn that something is less harmful than previously imagined. Funny, that. …

Think about it: Overall, air pollution in America has fallen dramatically for decades. Regulators set standards — a good thing — and enforced them. The air got cleaner. The battle was won. Whereupon the relevance of issue, of the regulators’ raison d’etre, diminishes. Unless, of course, they were to redefine pollution to half what it once was.

Or, as Christopher DeMuth of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out a decade ago on the subject of ozone, zero: “Some EPA watchers have long suspected that the agency’s unspoken agenda is progressively to ratchet down all pollution standards to zero — which, in public, it opportunistically justifies with health considerations one day and other considerations (aesthetics, global warming, whatever) the next. The impulse driving this agenda may be mere bureaucratic power-seeking or misguided environmental idealism.”

On the other hand, as overreaching as our state government is, at least Wisconsin hasn’t emulated New York … yet:

Not content with just trying to tax soft drinks, New York’s nanny-state politicians are also considering legislation to prohibit the use of salt in the preparation of restaurant food. Assemblyman Felix Ortiz introduced this absurdist bill on March 5. Ortiz is one of New York’s more strident food cops, having already introduced strict restaurant menu labeling proposals in the past. He is also following in the steps of fellow food nanny Mayor Michael Bloomberg who went so far as to compare salt to carcinogenic asbestos.

Such proposals make one think that any suggested level of government cuts isn’t enough.

Speaking of food, a surprisingly large kerfuffle has blown up over a bill that would allow farmers to sell raw milk to consumers and absolve farmers from liability. This came up during my Wisconsin Public Radio appearance Friday, and apparently the phones lit up even though we weren’t taking calls on the subject.

The glass-is-half-full group is farmers and those who tout the health benefits of raw milk. The glass-is-half-empty group is, of course, the bureaucrats who believe their job is to protect us from ourselves.

The arguments are summed up nicely in Letters in Bottles (of milk?):

Now, I know that many people reading this have probably never had raw milk. I haven’t had it since I was very, very young and don’t even remember it, but this isn’t so much about the raw milk itself as it is the right to consume and produce a product free from government intervention. The opponents of raw milk are arguing that farmers and consumers need to be saved from themselves.

You see, if the government doesn’t step in to save us from ourselves, people will get sick and die. I can go down to the corner store, buy a 30 pack of beer and a carton of cigarettes every day if I wanted to. I could consume them all by myself. I can eat 3 Big Macs for dinner every night and slowly kill myself with liver disease, lung cancer and heart disease — but raw milk! How dare I drink milk!

This is not to say that the government should regulate those other things, but that the government is going too far in general. This is the Dairy State. Milk and cheese are as synonymous with Wisconsin as beer and the Green Bay Packers. If produced in a clean environment, from healthy cows, raw milk is perfectly safe. My parents drank it straight from the bulk tanks on my grandfathers’ farms. My grandparents and their families grew up on it. My two grandfathers are now 83 and 90 years old and in pretty darn good health for their ages.

But that doesn’t matter. There may be some danger in consuming raw milk so the benevolent hand of government must reach into our refrigerators and our kitchens and tell us we can’t have it. But you can’t eliminate all risk. Are we going to ban playing outside by little kids because they could get hurt or sick?

I’m not a doctor, so I can’t assess the claims of health benefits. But, to quote raw milk consumer Marge Redmond, “It is not the role of the state to protect people by eliminating all risks and intruding unnecessarily into their lives.”

This past week of overreach and poor judgment, authorized by our elected officials or not, by those whose salaries are paid for by our tax dollars should make one not trust government for one second. (Just wait for our elected officials to ruin our health care this week.) Votes have consequences.