A New Black Market

It its attempt to turn the USA into the USSR, Congress is proposing to outlaw legal farmer's markets.

What this will do is force anyone who produces food of any kind, and then transports it to a different location for sale, to register with a new federal agency called the “Food Safety Administration.” Even growers who sell just fruit and/or vegetables at farmers markets would not only have to register, but they would be subject inspections by federal agents of their property and all records related to food production. The frequency of these inspections will be determined by the whim of the Food Safety Administration. Mandatory “safety” records would have to be kept. Anyone who fails to register and comply with all of this nonsense could be facing a fine of up to $1,000,000 per violation.

I’ve bought food at several farmers markets for years and I have yet to meet any vendors who are fond of the government. I think it’s pretty safe to say that most vendors at farmers markets won’t go along with this. The problem will be that the people who run the farmers markets will be forced to make sure that vendors are “registered” with the government.

Funny thing is that not even the USSR was this stupid. Private sales of food were all that stood between many people in the Soviet Union and starvation. The private plots on State Farms kept the Soviets going for forty years. In America we will be limited to what we can produce ourselves or what the food cartel provides.

This is just another small step down the road to a fascist state. We are mesmerized by ownership of property when the real question these days is control. That was the argument between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941. Is the optimum socialist state based on ownership or control? Obviously the ownership socialists have lost out to the control socialists. It turns out control is better because it is easier to evade the rules. Being unable to cheat the rules or bribe some one to evade them adds a lot of friction to an economy. Of course control socialism inevitably leads to cartelization. Because big companies can scrape up more loose cash to influence the controllers.

Can the government keep the economy within its authorized channels? With the black market in America making up between 20% and 40% of the domestic economy, I don't see how. That does not mean they won't make further efforts to try.

However, we have to recognize that our economy was effectively nationalized with the Supreme Court's 1942 decision in Wickard v. Filburn and recently confirmed in Gonzales v. Raich. It seems that Progressives Rewrote the Constitution and now we are in a situation that is getting Progressively Worse.

Cross Posted at Classical Values