Last week, The New American reported online, “The national shortage of baby formula was directly caused by the federal government and, as is typically the case, the solution when the government causes a problem is, well, more government. A baby-formula manufacturing plant was closed — by the federal government — in Sturgis, Michigan, after four infants who consumed products made there got sick, and two died, of a bacterial infection.”
“The manufacturer, Abbott Nutrition, disputes the charge that it was their baby formula that caused the bacterial infection, arguing there is ‘no conclusive evidence’ that their product was to blame.”
The Business Insider went a step further and reported, “Abbott also said that a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigation found ‘no conclusive evidence’ to link its formulas and infant illnesses.”
The shortage of formula is an unwanted stress that has no place being in 21st-century America, especially if the markets were driven without government interference. Clearly, something is terribly wrong. As The New American pointed out, that problem is government. Despite the CDC’s investigation conclusions, the Food & Drug Administration shutdown the plant, interrupting the supply of baby formula.
Last week, a Congressional subcommittee held a hearing and directed their ire at the FDA, as well as capitalism. CNBC reported that Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut, said during the hearing, “The shortage was caused in large part by the lack of action by the FDA and by corporate greed and consolidation.”
Notice the pivot to “corporate greed.” This term is a dog whistle usually meant to invoke additional government to rein in the “excesses of capitalism.” By the way, she has a lifetime score of 19 percent on the Freedom Index. She votes with the Constitution a mere 19 percent of the time.
In her opening statement dripping with hypocrisy, Representative DeLauro said, “We need to get to the bottom of FDA slow response, which contributed to product staying on the shelf and in the homes of families the country over, potentially putting babies at risk and forcing parents to play a game of Russian Roulette that they did not know they would be playing.”
Yet, where is her compassion for the lives of those same children just months before they were born?
Last September on the floor of Congress, she vehemently argued for a “woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.” She has no compassion, and neither do those supporting the killing of the unborn while at the same time suggesting that corporate greed is the cause for families playing “Russian Roulette” with babies.
The background of the FDA is rather interesting and holds a similar stance on the issue of “corporate greed.” According to its website,
its origins as a federal consumer protection agency began with the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act. This law was the culmination of about 100 bills over a quarter-century that aimed to rein in long-standing, serious abuses in the consumer product marketplace.
Federal public health protection was vigorously advocated by Harvey Washington Wiley, who at the time was chief chemist of the Bureau of Chemistry of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, FDA’s predecessor. The 1906 Act was passed thanks to his efforts and in response to the public outrage at the shockingly unhygienic conditions in the Chicago stockyards that were described in Upton Sinclair’s book “The Jungle.”
Notice, once again, the attack on capitalism that was used to justify this federal agency. Let’s look at that closer.
In our March 2, 1998, issue, The New American wrote,
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wields life or death power over the delectables we consume and the pills and potions we take to alleviate ailments. It ranks near the top of the list of ruthless and intrusive federal regulatory entities. A critical profile of Theodore Roosevelt by William Anderson, a Mises Fellow in the economics PhD program at Auburn University, describes how the 26th President connived to catapult the agency into existence.
Writing in the February issue of The Free Market, Anderson recalls, “During the Spanish-American War, meat packers shipped dressed meats to Cuba for distribution to the inland troops. After the meats were unloaded at the ports, the meat packers warned army quartermasters to keep the meat on ice, or else it would spoil.” The warnings were often ignored, however, so “by the time the meat reached troops, most of the time it was spoiled.”
Meat companies were accused of “profiteering on rotten meat and attempting to poison the troops. Roosevelt carried this resentment to the presidency and when Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906, TR had his excuse to act.”
Here we go again: Create a problem, and get government to fix it.
However, did Upton Sinclair expose or invent the problem? William Anderson has much more to say. Again, back to The New American article.
Anderson writes that Sinclair, who once ran for public office as a socialist, penned his fictional account of unsanitary conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry “in the hopes of converting Americans to socialism, and he found a willing ally in Roosevelt,” who, acting in the name of the public interest, “ordered an investigation of the meat industry, which was delivered to him in secret later that year. However, the President refused to release the report, saying only that the contents were ‘devastating,’ and he bullied Congress into passing the Pure Food and Drug Act, which created the FDA, an agency which bedevils the country to this day.”
Regarding that “devastating” report, Anderson writes, “When Sinclair visited the White House in 1906, the President remarked to him that the study contained nothing incriminating.”
What an apropos way to kickoff an unconstitutional government agency.
The FDA has a long history of abusing its ill-gotten powers, and our American Opinion journal reported in January 1978 from the testimony of U.S. Representative Symms from Idaho that the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1962 “have dramatically increased the time, money, and paperwork necessary to get a new drug to the American market. The 1962 amendments have virtually eliminated drug research, innovation, and development. The truly unfortunate aspect of the 1962 amendments is that there is little evidence that they have improved the effectiveness of new drugs. The American consumer has been the loser, both economically and medically, as a result of the effectiveness provisions.”
In December 1976, the American Opinion journal issued a mighty screed against the FDA, tapping into the frustration of the American people and those in the medical community.
It reported,
Who knows what life-saving “miracle drug” remains on the shelf because of the F.D.A.? Dr. Davis of Private Practice contends that if the 1962 fright Amendments had not been passed, “and we were getting 60 to 200 new drugs each year to help heal our patients, as we did before 1962, we are justified in assuming that we would have answers for some of the major diseases that kill our patients. About a million people die each year from cardiovascular diseases, 300,000 from malignancies, 70,000 from influenza and pneumonia, 31,000 from bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma. Think how many people would be alive today if we could have saved 10 percent of these people and multiply this by 12 years.” Those saved would number twenty-four times as many as we lost in all the years of the Vietnam War; more than twice the number we lost in World War I and World War II combined.
The sad truth is that the practices of the Food and Drug Administration are killing tens of thousands. And it is needless. The president of Laser Pharmaceuticals, for example, has pointed out in a letter to Congressman Steven Symms that “many European countries and England require only proof of safety and allow the ‘effectiveness’ to be proven in the marketplace.
Obviously, the physician who prescribes the medication for his patient is the one who can make the final decision on effectiveness, which is where the responsibility should be placed.”
But today, we are seeing the opposite. More and more responsibility is being taken away from the medical experts and handed over to government bureaucracy.
By the end of last year, Americans were shocked to learn that the FDA was purchasing aborted baby parts for a so-called humanized mice project. This is the depths of depravity that this unaccountable government bureaucracy can stoop to.
Even during the contrived Covid crisis, the FDA and other illogical, immoral, and unethical federal agencies like the CDC worked in conjunction to stymie access to legitimate drugs that if applied early, would have saved many lives, instead of following the government protocol of waiting until there were major problems before getting treatment.
In our February 28, 2022 issue, The New American reported,
Their failed policies are “literally written by pharmaceutical companies,” said [Dr. Pierre] Kory, who condemned the government for ignoring both science and the overwhelming success in countries that have employed safe, inexpensive remedies such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. “They are putting profits ahead of patients,” Kory reproached.
Meanwhile, Big-Pharma-serving bureaucrats push experimental vaccines on a compliant public, while concealing skyrocketing adverse reactions. “We have 21,000 cases of myocarditis and climbing in the United States,” warned [Dr. Peter] McCullough. “We are seeing unprecedented numbers of young athletes dying.” He stated, “Under no circumstances should a young person ever receive one of these vaccines.”
Given this, should we really trust the FDA?
Believe it or not, NPR gave an interesting look into how the federal government has greatly helped to contribute to the formula shortage. It reported,
The federal government not only regulates formula makers. It’s also their biggest customer. About half of all formula sold in the U.S. is paid for by the Department of Agriculture, through its Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC).
Each state signs an exclusive contract with one of the formula manufacturers to supply subsidized product for low-income families. The government gets a big price break. In exchange, the formula maker gets a large, captive market.
It continued,
“Because the WIC program is such a large purchaser — it buys about half the formula on the market — once a company has an exclusive deal to service a state, competitors don’t have a financial incentive to compete in that state,” [Claire Kelloway of the Open Markets Institute] says.
Abbott — the company behind the shuttered Michigan plant — has the WIC monopoly in about two-thirds of all states. The administration has asked states to relax those rules temporarily, so WIC recipients can use their benefits to buy any brand of formula.
Plus, as The New American pointed out in its online article, “the Biden administration has exacerbated the problem by diverting scarce supplies of baby formula to the southern border to take care of the flood of illegal immigrants attempting to enter the country — another problem caused directly by the government, specifically policies of Biden that almost invite more immigrants into the country.”
The FDA has demonstrated to be just another example that too much government is an impediment to freedom and American industry. Outside of its limitations, it is not a necessary evil, no matter what kind of crisis it contrives to get us to think and act otherwise.
The sad thing about this is that the FDA and many, many more of these federal agencies are unconstitutional, and should never have been created. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution is the list of powers delegated to Congress. Nowhere in it is authorization for the type of governmental control we see today. Go ahead and point to the so-called commerce clause, but if that is used as a reason to implement such draconian government, just know that this practice flies in the face of the concept of limited government as set-up by the Founding Fathers.
Watch what government will do if and when monkeypox becomes the next pandemic excuse. Already we’re seeing that a “tabletop exercise” was conducted at a globalist security conference in March of 2021 that recommended national governments adopt a “no-regrets” approach involving the “whole-of-government [to] engage early,” according to the report it published last fall. Based on the unconstitutional reactions of our local, state, and federal governments due to Covid, this “no-regrets” approach should cause concern for all freedom-loving Americans.
Many Americans would love to invoke their right to be left alone. Unfortunately, when we are missing from the battlefield to protect freedom, our enemy fills that vacuum.
To take back our rights, liberties, and freedom, we should heed the advice of Thomas Jefferson, who said, “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is … to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”
The John Birch Society has followed this advice since 1958, organizing the local grassroots into an educational army that distributes material to help raise awareness of the root cause and applicable solutions that will right this Republic. Over the years, we have been very successful in creating educated electorates and protecting American independence and the Constitution.
American freedom is under the greatest attack of our lives. If you think Covid was bad, you haven’t seen anything yet. It’s time to join The John Birch Society in doing something constructive for freedom today and tomorrow. Don’t delay. Visit JBS.org to get started.
