RFK Jr. was not popular in Republican circles for his entire life. Yesterday, it was the Democrats' turn to criticize him. He will get confirmed. The real fireworks are going to be with Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard.
The problems in our system are deep, ingrained, and highly centralized. The problems we have in Big Medical, and Big Agricultural are similar to the problems we have in Big Education, Big Welfare, Big Defense, Big Banking, Big Insurance, and any other industrial complex administered by the government.
I want to take a moment to analyze the MAHA movement. Some of the most violent pushback against Trump is from people who embrace centralized government systems to administer our lives.
I think it’s a good movement, but you can take things too far. MAHA touches on a few government-enabled industrial complexes, but the primary two are Medical and Agricultural. I know a bit about the Ag one since I participated in the commodity industry for most of my career.
RFK Jr is right. We should ask questions about vaccines. Why are we giving a hepatitis vaccine to babies when they are born? Maybe wait until their systems are more able to tolerate it. The science isn’t settled.
Certainly, we know the Covid vaccine was rushed to market. The Pharma companies had legal cover provided by the government. You can’t sue for any damages from the vaccine. The Covid vaccine didn’t work. The vaccine and all the policies designed to mitigate Covid were very expensive failures. Covid uncovered the inefficiencies and preferences of the Medical Industrial Complex. As Warren Buffett likes to say, the tide went out and we saw who was naked in the nude beach. It wasn’t pretty.
Vaccines stop diseases in their tracks. The Covid vaccine didn’t. A vaccine eradicated smallpox.
Years ago, when I was on the trading floor, germs spread quickly. Spittle flew through the air constantly, and we were closer to each other than you sleep with your spouse—for hours upon hours a day. You knew at some point during the year, you were going to get sick with some bug. You just hoped it would be a cold.
Someone on the floor brought the mumps to us. We quickly discovered who had been vaccinated and who had not. A friend of mine had not been vaccinated and spent several days at home. Getting the mumps at an older age can make you sterile, and he hadn’t had kids yet. My own glands swelled on my face in response to being exposed, but since I was vaccinated, I didn’t get the mumps and within a day the swelling subsided. The mumps vaccine works.
I understand much of MAHA is highly suspicious of the Medical-Industrial complex. But, there is a lot of great science practiced by the Medical-Industrial complex, and much of it extends and enriches our lives. As I wrote yesterday, it is time to rethink how we fund medical research in the United States. There is a lot more we can do to rethink the way the entire medical industry interacts with the US public. Bringing a lot of competition and deregulating parts of the industry will benefit us all.
MAHA is also suspicious of the Farming Industrial complex. The Farming Industrial Complex is enabled by the federal government. It started with the New Deal in 1933. Simply because Trump was elected and RFK Jr was a part of the success of his campaign we are seeing all kinds of news now on different food additives.
People want to remake the entire food chain, and you hear buzzwords like “local”, “organic”, and “whole food”. You hear that the existing food supply in the US is making us sick.
I think things like this can be taken too far.
For example, today egg and chicken prices are extremely high. Avian flu is being blamed for the increase. It’s convenient because we are relatively helpless against it. However, what’s left unsaid is the regulations around raising chickens. Many states started to regulate the size of chicken cages or the methods farmers used to raise chickens. They were put in place because humans who didn’t understand farming felt it was more humane.
They have an idealized Hollywood version of what a farm is supposed to look like. That idealized farm works for a family or small community. It cannot feed 330 million people nor can it feed the world.
I am all for producing “slow food” or whatever you want to call it. I think people like Joel Salatin are geniuses for what they have done, and the way they have changed the conversation around food production in the United States. I have met him. If you don’t know about him, here is a short video.
Joel is a revolutionary, and visionary. Can the way he envisions farming be done at scale? We don’t know. But, it’s worth looking at and trying but we shouldn’t scrap everything we have been doing and switch until we prove it out.
Additionally, it would be wise to transform a lot of the ways we administer farming at the policy level before we trash all the old stuff we have been doing. For example, getting rid of farm subsidies which were instituted in The New Deal purely to curry favor with farmers and get them to vote Democratic is a great idea. Putting Milton Friedman’s idea to work and getting rid of the Department of Agriculture in its entirety might be a great idea. Certainly, allowing competition to bloom and creating incentives for more slaughterhouses is a fantastic idea.
If you want to buck the system and grow cattle a different way, the Dept of Ag makes it difficult. If you want to buck the system and run your dairy herd a different way, the Dairy co-ops in partnership with Big Government Agriculture will make it difficult. Big Government has a very large say in how every crop is grown in the United States. It has a big say in what gets funded for research at Ag Colleges around the country.
The first step is getting rid of existing crappy policy. It is not, get rid of crappy policy then use government power to enact new ones.
Here is an example. RFK Jr. mentioned that Coca-Cola KO 0.00%↑ (and other soft drink manufacturers) don’t use cane sugar to sweeten their drinks. Most of them use sugar beets. Sugar from sugar beets is cheaper. Why? There are a couple of reasons. They are row crops, and cheaper to grow. But, the Cane Sugar Lobby otherwise known as the “Sugar Barons” benefits from high tariffs on sugar imports. Getting rid of those tariffs will cause the price of cane sugar to decrease. Companies like Coca-Cola might make different business decisions regarding the inputs they use to manufacture soft drinks as prices change.
Both sugar beets and cane sugar get subsidies to grow crops. What happens if you end tariffs and subsidies? Will those farmers keep farming sugar beets or will they look to do something else with their land?
Farmers are the original entrepreneurs in America. They are resourceful people. We know from data and experience that an individual owner of land will manage it and take care of it a lot better than any NGO or any government bureaucracy. Getting the government out of the way of the farmer and letting them take total control of their land will increase the amount of innovation.
Let 10,000 Joel Salatin’s bloom. The market will decide if they are worth it or not.
We have regulated ourselves at the national level into corners as far as the eye can see. We have also subsidized ourselves to the point of having the same numbness a heroin addict gets after a hit. The federalization of everything has completely divorced us from having to actually think for ourselves regarding aspects of our life we should be doing some more thinking about. We rarely if ever since the Wilson Administration ever rollback the unconstitutional encroachment that the federal government makes into all aspects of our lives for one reason or another. This unwind needs to start now- but it is massive and will have tremendous impact downstream.
I appreciate your analysis of our food system. However, the RFK hearings have absolutely nothing to do with that. These people know exactly how they are going to vote no matter what he says. All the Dems will vote against. All the Repubs will vote for except a couple or three pre arranged. I don't care about their meetings. Or "after much thought" and other nonsense.