At what point do the nanny state's presumptions of the incompetence of the average citizen in particular situations add up to a presumption that the average citizen is incompetent in general? And how do we justify elections after that?

I KNEW that someone here at the VC was an expert on raw milk herd-share agreements. Now THAT'S a comparative advantage!

Actually, Jonathan is an expert on environmental and safety regulation. So this is indeed in his area of comparative advantage.

Right. This is generally the flaw with all such bans. While we can probably agree that the legislature would be right to enact a law against deceptive sales practices: e.g., you assume that the milk you're buying has been heat-treated but in fact it has not--ergo you deceived into a risk that you did not expect, versus laws which attempt to nanny legally competent people (i.e., adults).

Lets apply this reasoning to a few cases:
Raw milk: legal in-trade
Cigarettes: legal in-trade to legally competent people
ditto Alcohol and other presently designated controlled substances

Person - I don't know, but I suspect that if the state feels motorists aren't capable of pumping their own gas (as do NJ and OR), they have already reached that point.

Nick

The regulation of Raw Milk is the direct result of the political contributions of the big three milk processors, who wish to maintain a high economic barrier to entry for potential competitors. Milk processing plants are hideously expensive. In Virginia, one must provide a seperate office and bathroom within the facility for the exclusive use of the milk inspector. A bare-bones pasteurization plant that meets state requirements is a multi-hundred thousand dollar investment.

Dairy farmers are receiving in the neighborhood of 22 cents per pound of milk - about 1.60 a gallon. Most grocery stores use dairy products as loss leaders, so the vast majority of the difference between 1.60 and the actual grocery price of milk is gobbled by the milk processors and their transportation costs. The fact that they hold near monopolies perverts the free market and does not allow farmers to shop their milk to earn higher prices.

The justification used to paper over this blatant exploitation of the farmer and consumer is that raw milk is dangerous.

Facts:
Over two million Americans drink raw milk on a daily basis.

There have been about 1700 illnesses attributed to drinking raw milk over the last thirty years.

This comes to about 60 people per year out of 2 million daily consumers.

Additionally, there had never been a single case of illness attributed to grass-fed dairy cows who are not fed grain.

This requires regulation that creates a virtual monopoly for a troika of companies?

Bah!

Oh wait, I misread. The 2 million figure is fine. Still, got a link?

If raw milk bans are really to prevent transmission of TB —a worthy goal— then the appropriate legislation would prohibit sale of milk containing TB.

Mandating a procedure (heat treatment) to accomplish a different goal (stop TB transmission) is illogical and anti-capitalist. There are many ways to prevent milk from being a TB vector.

The problem with current practice is —as Smallholder wrote— the enormous investment in pasturization. (I'll add that pasturization per se, such as stovetop processing, isn't allowed either, the entire process is mandated by regulation.) The unintended consequence is centralization of supplies, creating a security target.

The heat process may break up microbes, but also breaks up other milk components. Many people labeled 'lactose intolerant' aren't; their bodies reject these byproducts, and they can digest raw milk well.

Question: What is the standard, or resonable standard, to force compliance under the umbrella of public health?

See, this is why Prof. Adler is mistaken. People who "go through the trouble" of entering into these agreements are more likely to be informed about the case FOR raw milk, sure. But there's no reason to assume they're informed about both sides of the issue.

The law necessarily contains an exception for people drinking milk from their own cows because it would be preposterous for the state to try and regulate that behavior. But the economic reality is that people who are "renting portions of a cow" are, in fact, buying and selling raw milk. It's straightforward exploitation of a loophole and of course it shouldn't be permitted.

As other commenters noted, raw milk is dangerous because of the presence of bacteria. E. coli and TB were mentioned. TB is especially troublesome because the raw milk drinkers who acquire TB can be asymptomatic yet still transmit TB to other persons. That is what makes this a public health issue. If raw milk drinkers could guarantee that they would never transmit a milk-acquired disease to others, I would support lifting the restriction.

As a child I drank raw goat's milk. As an adult physician I shudder: the goats' udders and bellies were not clean, bits of dirty straw would fall into the milk pail, and all we did was pour the milk through filter paper. Fortunately, we all had good immune systems.

I saw a simpler but workable small scale arrangement a few decades ago in another state: lactose larceny.

The thieves would park on the road outside the farm gate, climb over; walk to the dairy barn; draw off their gallon or two from the cooler vat; leave money on the floor corresponding to the amount of milk taken, and drive away. Thieves came and went all evening. Farmer didn't call the sheriff if he didn't notice you from the house. Short change him, and he might notice you the next time.

As the bard sang, "to live outside the law you must be honest."

I have a lovely book from the early 1900's that talks about typhoid, typhus and an assortment of other lovely issues that occured when treatment wasn't as common as today. We forget how bad it really was once upon a time.

In part, we won't be having the huge epidemics even if we did legalize this, because we treat our water now, thereby reducing one of the main vectors, but your still stuck with people who don't wash their hands thouroughly after getting their diarrheal disorder (and they don't. I believe I've seen more than a few studies that point that out).

This is intersting, because sometimes people talk about old laws and rules as if they're silly, or that they don;t apply anymore, but they forget that rules exist because sometimes lawmakers write laws based on solid experience.


This all being said, I agree with fub's comment. I couldn't sanction this legally, but I don't think it will be all that bad either.

subpatre sez, 'Eradication of TB in cattle, a simple and basic step, has never been proposed,' a statement I have seen before from rightwing sources.

This is not true. Ask any rancher what happens whwn his cows tests positive. USDA kills his herd. In my county, when the infection proved intractable, ALL the cows were killed.

At the point where "health authorities" start giving birth to these children.


By this reasoning, there should be no child endangerment or child abuse laws at all.

It makes no sense to answer the question of "when shall the government interfere with what a parent does to a child" with "never". Everyone recognizes that there's a point where the child is subject to enough risk that society can't tolerate it. We're only arguing about exactly what "enough" is.

I found this very informative. (About a third-way down the page.) Apparently part of the resistance to raw milk is protectionism from the cheese industry that is afraid of imports of raw-milk cheese. It also mentions that California allows the sale of raw milk as long as it meets the standards for pasteurized milk. (As an aside, FAIRWAY rocks!)

Ras,

The 2 million number comes from Joel Salatin's testimony before the Virginia House of Delegates. I don't know of a link easily available online. Last year a bill allowing the sale of raw milk by people with 3 or fewer cows or six or fewer goats, directly from the farm to the end consumer, provided that the farmer's cows had veterinary certification that they were free of TB, Bangs, etc., passed one house of the Virginia legislature. The milk lobby went nuts and killed it in the other chamber. The 1700 illness is from the pro-pasteurization milk lobbies own testimony. Salatin cleaned their clocks - famously (at least to us libertarian farmer types) compating the number of deaths from Viagra use to raw milk.

The two million drinkers, as I recall (and this was a while ago, so I wouldn't bet the farm - so to speak - on it), was based on the number of people who drink raw milk on their own farms (as I do), as well as a survey by the Weston A. Price foundation (an admittedly libertarian group), and government data. Can I replicate for you? No way. But even diminish this by half and the 1700 illnesses claimed by the milk lobby are still less than the numbers of men suffering heart attacks from the little blue pill.

As to epidimeology, larger, grain-fed herds suffering from acidosis and consuming a steady diet of antibiotics are a recipe for new and nasty bugs. Grass-fed cows who don't live in their own own manure, have clean teats, are healthy, able to enjoy the disinfectant power of sunshine, and aren't living cheek by jowel next to five hundred other cows are healthier and less likely to pass on the disease.

No one who favors raw milk is saying that cows shouldn't be tested for diseases capable of transferring to humans. We do support that - it is, after all, our kids who will be drinking the milk.

The lie beneath the "public health" invocation of the milk lobby is obvious in that it is only illegal to SELL raw milk - one can give it away quite legally. I served raw milk ice cream to sixty of my students and their parents at our post AP-test party last year. Legally. Safely.

For those who say that the problem is milk-handling and that milk is a "perfect medium for bacteria," I'd reply: The same goes for pasteurized milk post-handling. One can have a much greater level of safety if one knows the farmer and the milk went into clean bottles immediately instead of being passed through dozens of hands and transporters in the industrial chain.

One last note - the historical background to pasteurization in the United States results from the New Immigration at the turn of the last century. With refrigeration unavailable to the vast majority of slum dwellers, entrepreneurs built dairies in the basements of tenements, next door to distilleries, and began feeding distellery waste grains to their cows. These cows lived short lives in the disease-laden conditions and passed TB back and forth. A combination of crowding, lack of sanitation, no refrigeration at all, acidosis (grain feeding alters the ph of the rumen) lowering the immune system of the cows, as well as the disease-infested poor immigrant workers, all contributed to the growing health crisis of the rapidly growing cities. Progressive reformers argued for pasteurization as a way to safeguard public health. Milk processors now had a competitive advantage: paseurized milk could be sold for a higher price.

The historical neccesity of pasteurizing urban milk no longer exists - but we still have the processors demanding laws that protect their comfy little industry.

Blog threads like this reaffirm my view that VC is better than porn. More exciting, rewarding and a lot less likely to land one a postmortem hotspot.

Thank you so much, Smallholder. A little hisotrical perspective goes a long way.

The milk issue reminds me of the debates surrounding, for example, radiating meat (cheaper than running a clean pen) FDA "organic" rules (cheaper to change meaning of word than to actually engage in the farming that results in the produce originally referred to with that word), etc.

It makes me wonder why any thoughtful and decent fellow would be anything but libertarian in his outlook. But I suppose faith in government is the true opiate of the masses.

My personal inclination is to let people buy raw milk, as long as they can keep any diseases developed from this limited to their own family.

This becomes an issue in setting like child care facilites where improper handwashing by the children of staff can lead to the spreading of pathogens from one child to the other.

What are the ethical, legal, philosophical implications of a family drinking raw milk and vectoring an e coli 0157 infection from their children to other children who don't drink raw milk?

Harry,

I didn't mean to argue that TB is nonexistent in range cattle - I was pointing out that the explosion of disease was an artifact of bringing dairy cows into the city. That said, with modern testing, there have been NO illnesses transferred to humans from grass-based dairies - but grass-based dairies, like all dairies, have testing procedure for those diseases. TB is watched much more closely is dairy cattle since the disease is quite contagious in milk form. I'm not arguing that there should be no regulation - only that regulation should be health-protection oriented (i.e. Bangs, Brucellosis, TB, Somatic Cell Count, E. Coli testing), not "protection of the big company" testing.

TJIT, if we also withdraw the ridiculous corn subsidies started by Butz, rational meat and grain producers would become smaller - only artificially subsidized corn (a subsidy that is designed not to help the family farm but food conglomerates like Archer-Daniels-Midland), grass feeding becomes cheaper. Additionally, without cost-sharing to alleviate corporate farm and feedlot waste "manaegement," the cost of disposing of a thousand cows' waste become untenable. With a small-sized farm, the dairy and beef cows do not have a waste problem - the bacteria in the soil can easily handle the waste of a cow per acre. Particularly with grazing dairies, there is a maximum limit set by how much energy the cows spend moving from paddock to paddock. If the cows spend all day walking, they don't have time to eat, chew their cud, or make milk. New Zealand is about at that limit right now.

I was under the impression that most raw milk is used to make cheese, rather than consumed directly. I therefore understand the ant-raw milk charge to be good old fashioned protectionism: We can't have people eating that dangerous Francified cheese when they could be having Kraft American singles, right?