Apparently we and the journalists tasked to keep us informed have become so inured to just taking orders from the central planners back at the Kremlin on the Potomac that no one raises the least bit of objection to the most invidious invasion of our affairs and lives.
School vending machines. (AP photo)
In a 1,000-word article by The Associated Press, it is dutifully reported that the Agriculture Department is ordering schools to allow only healthy low-calorie, low-fat, low-salt meals and snacks. Just once in the entire article is any resistance to the nanny-statism even mentioned, and only as the generic “conservatives, including some Republicans in Congress, who said the government shouldn’t be telling kids what to eat.”
Even today’s Review-Journal editorial criticizing the order is largely built around the fact it is a waste of money.
Where in the Constitution does it authorize any branch of the federal government to dictate what our children eat? For that matter where does it authorize an Agriculture Department?
Its very existence stretches the Commerce and Necessary and Proper clauses beyond credulity.
We now have the answer to Justice Antonin Scalia’s question during the ObamaCare litigation, “Everybody has to buy food sooner or later. Therefore, you can make people buy broccoli?”
But what is most galling is the way in which 99.9 percent of Americans swallow such dictates with utter docility, without question, without objection.
Brutus predicted in Anti-Federalist Paper No. 17:
“But what is meant is, that the legislature of the United States are vested with the great and uncontrollable powers of laying and collecting taxes, duties, imposts, and excises; of regulating trade, raising and supporting armies, organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, instituting courts, and other general powers; and are by this clause invested with the power of making all laws, proper and necessary, for carrying all these into execution; and they may so exercise this power as entirely to annihilate all the State governments, and reduce this country to one single government. And if they may do it, it is pretty certain they will; for it will be found that the power retained by individual States, small as it is, will be a clog upon the wheels of the government of the United States; the latter, therefore, will be naturally inclined to remove it out of the way. Besides, it is a truth confirmed by the unerring experience of ages, that every man, and every body of men, invested with power, are ever disposed to increase it, and to acquire a superiority over everything that stands in their way. This disposition, which is implanted in human nature, will operate in the Federal legislature to lessen and ultimately to subvert the State authority, and having such advantages, will most certainly succeed, if the Federal government succeeds at all. It must be very evident, then, that what this Constitution wants of being a complete consolidation of the several parts of the union into one complete government, possessed of perfect legislative, judicial, and executive powers, to all intents and purposes, it will necessarily acquire in its exercise in operation.”
4TH ST8 