The War on Nutrition

Nanny Statism
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Slate writer Melinda Wenner Moyer makes a big to-do over new mainstream medical-research findings that suggest that saturated fats affect your blood-cholesterol levels in ways that don’t really hurt you, while processed sugars affect your blood-cholesterol levels in ways that do hurt you.  I agree with Moyer that the topic is something over which it is worthwhile to make a big to-do.  The bottom line:  LDL (“bad, bad”) cholesterol comes in a variety of flavors, distinguished by the sizes of the particles in your blood.  Big LDL particles — those you get from eating fatty meat — seem not to attach to artery walls; those are the heart-neutral particles.  Small and medium LDL particles — the ones you get into your blood by eating processed sugars and flours — do appear to attach to artery walls and contribute to heart disease.

The knowledge that processed carbohydrates lead to problems with blood cholesterol isn’t new, however.  Dr. Sheldon Reiser published studies showing that processed-carb intake raises LDL and triglyceride levels back in 1983.  (You’ll have to visit a library to find this:  “Physiological Differences between Starches and Sugars,” in Medical Applications of Clinical Nutrition pp. 133-177, ed. By J. Bland, Keats Pub. New Canaan, CN, 1983.)

I’ve known how to eat well for years, but recently have set aside the time and developed the motivation to really do it.  What occurred to me while I was shopping:  My wife and I are now shopping mostly for meats (including fish), cheeses, nuts, and a huge variety of fresh produce.  In other words, the “radical” healthy diets some of us are eating, including the “paleo” diet, remind me of what my grandmother ate (though our grandparents didn’t know to avoid bread, especially white bread).  Of course, we’re avoiding processed foods, which everybody has known to do for decades.

So, what’s the federal government to do?  Government officials have been waging war on our meat and fat intake for years, most recently with the updated food pyramid (the one from 2005, due to be updated this year) that calls for six or more servings of grain (only half of them whole grain), and only two of meat, per day — a diet likely to make anyone but a marathon runner gain body fat and tiny-bit LDL.  Knowing that the 2005 pyramid is already obsolete, is there any reason to trust the next one, or any reason to trust that the government’s new war on salt is any more credible?

The final answer:  Don’t trust the government’s war on nutrition (ostensibly a war on bad nutrition) any more than its wars on inflation, unemployment, drugs, or terrorism.  Inform yourself, take control of your own health, and enjoy a long and healthy life in spite of the government’s attempts to help.

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Left-Libertarians Admit Opposition to “Capitalism” is Substantive

(Austrian) Economics, Libertarian Theory, The Left
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I’ve noted in recent posts that while some left-libertarians seem to oppose standard libertarians’ positive endorsement of “capitalism” for semantic or strategic reasons, for others they actually oppose the substance of what libertarians mean by (non-crony, non-corporatist) capitalism (see, e.g., Capitalism, Socialism, and Libertarianism, and links in that post; see also Wirkman Virkkala’s post A capital ism?). An example of those with a more semantic or strategic concern would be Sheldon Richman, who is concerned about the “baggage” associated with the word, which will hamper our getting our pro-property rights, libertarian message out. Thus he favors using “free market” instead, but as far as I can tell this is similar to what we mean by “capitalism”–a libertarian society with a market based on respect for property rights, which of course includes private ownership of the means of production (and everything else). (See also Sheldon’s comment to Should Libertarians Oppose “Capitalism”?) Another would be Jock Coats, who notes here that while the baggage of the term “capitalism” might have turned him off had he not also seen the term “free-market anti-capitalism,” now that he understands the term he is “quite happy to be identified as an Individualist Anarchist/Mutualist and at times an Anarcho-Caplitalist,” and is “for keeping ‘capitalism’ as a word in our lexicon.”

To be clear, I think the semantical and strategic debate is one we can have, but it’s different than a substantive disagreement–and we can have that discussion too. But these are separate discussions and should not be intermingled. This leads to confusion at best and equivocation and dishonesty (on the part of leftists) at worst.

In my view there is little doubt that libertarians who have concerns about the appropriate words to use or strategic matters are of course libertarians. We just differ on the best way to convey and spread and communicate about our ideas. But those who disagree on substance may simply not be libertarians. This should not be masked by conflating the discussion with more mundane issues of semantics and strategy.

Now some of the left-libertarians more concerned about terminology and strategy deny or downplay the charge that at least some of them have much more than a mere lexical disagreement with us. So it is good that some of them are willing to explicitly admit this. Take, for instance, one Roman Pearah, who writes in Hmmm…No, Sir. I Don’t Like It.: …

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Better Than the Golden Rule?

The Basics
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Attempts to summarize all morality into a simple principle are ancient. Long before Kant’s categorical imperative we were blessed with the Silver and Golden Rules. Indeed, there is a sort of progress in the development of these rules:

Silver: Do not do unto others that which you do not want done to yourself.

Golden: Do unto others that which you want done unto you.

Cat. Imp.: Act only in such a manner that you can at the same time will that your act should become a universal law.

But the progress may be illusory. …

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Parsing Political Language: Is Obama an Inveterate Liar?

Democracy, Taxation, Vulgar Politics
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With the news breaking today that “Obama suggests value-added tax may be an option,” many of my fellow libertarians are going to pat themselves on the back while (cynically) claiming that the President has broken yet another campaign promise and is, therefore, a liar. They’re wrong, of course. Politicians don’t lie. They speak precisely. Libertarians need to pay closer attention to what politicians actually say instead of misinterpreting what was said. Remember too that all language is metaphorical and definitions can vary for any word. Here’s master-linguist William Jefferson Clinton explaining it much more concisely than I:

Eat your heart out, Derrida.

Libertarians will tell you that Obama made a firm pledge not to raise taxes on any family making less than $250,000 per year. This is false. Here is the actual video:

He chose his words precisely.

Transcription: “And I can make a firm pledge: under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase, not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

Let’s take a look at the language there: “He can make a pledge” that no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase.” Note that he didn’t make a pledge; rather, he said he can make a pledge. Simple statement of fact. I believe him. It’s not difficult to make a pledge. All he has to do is say, “I pledge…” followed by the pledge. He didn’t say that. If that’s not enough to settle the issue for you, he said “no family”. Well, what’s a family? Don’t even try to define family. I could present you with 40 different definitions for family off the top of my head. It’s impossible, therefore, precisely to know whom he was referring to in this non-pledge. Not convinced yet? Well, he said “making less than $250,000 a year.” But, see, my father (a brilliant economist) taught me when I was a child that it’s imprecise to talk about “making money”. You know who makes money? The Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing and other counterfeiters. What productive people do is “earn money”. Understand the difference? Finally, the non-defined families which counterfeit “less than $250,000 a year” that he’s describing in his non-pledge won’t “see” any form of tax increase. They might “experience” it. They’ll certainly pay it. They just won’t “see” it.

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Counterfeit Property Rights

IP Law, Protectionism, Victimless Crimes
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One of the reasons to oppose intellectual property is that it assigns partial ownership rights to real, tangible, and already-owned property to non-first-comers. For example, that copy you made of Microsoft Office, although you own the disk, you are restricted by law in how you may use this disk, e.g. installing the program, or selling it.

In some cases, IP laws assign a complete ownership, as demonstrated this week when Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes obtained the permission of certain trademark owners to redistribute seized counterfeit clothing items which didn’t belong to either party on condition that their trademarks and identifying labels be removed from the articles.

What I would like is to hear an explanation for is this inconsistency– if there was a counterfeited Nike ‘swoosh’ label once attached to this sneaker, now that it has been removed, why is the sneaker still being treated in the eyes of the law as the rightful property of Nike?

Honestly, I find the concept of IP laws to be illogical in any of its various manifestations whether copyright, trademark, patent, or otherwise. This is not to say that I condone either fraud or misrepresentation, both of which can be reduced to theft– the obtainment of property without the consent of the owner. But merely producing and offering for sale an article of clothing that resembles the output of another producer doesn’t violate anyone else’s rights, even if for the sake of argument we were to concede with sloppy semantic quibbles that it “harms” the potential sales of the other party, since the other party does not enjoy a right to not have his sales diminished by competition.

This is all beside the point that in the common arrangement where counterfeit goods are offered for sale, both the buyer and seller are well aware that the goods are knock-offs, and we can safely assume that no fraud or misrepresentation has transpired.

To conclude, after being robbed suffering a coerced charitable giving, the de facto owner was made further victim to kidnapping and is now serving a seven month prison sentence. As is usually the case, existing positivist law has enshrined principles antithetical to property right in the name of property rights.

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