perfidy

One can imagine many threats that might require the use of armed force to contain.  A crazed gunman.  Terrorist plotters with bombs.  Criminals about their evil business.  What you normally wouldn't include on that list is hippy organic dairy farmers catering to those with a hankering for raw milk.

But you wouldn't be the federal government, would you?

With no warning one weekday morning, investigators entered an organic grocery with a search warrant and ordered the hemp-clad workers to put down their buckets of mashed coconut cream and to step away from the nuts.

Then, guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid's target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk.

"I still can't believe they took our yogurt," said Rawesome volunteer Sea J. Jones, a few days after the raid. "There's a medical marijuana shop a couple miles away, and they're raiding us because we're selling raw dairy products?"

The government, of course, insists that it is acting to protect consumers and ensure a level playing field.

"This is not about restricting the public's rights," said Nicole Neeser, program manager for dairy, meat and poultry inspection at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. "This is about making sure people are safe."

If it's not about restricting people's rights, then why are people's rights being, ah, restricted?  The raw food movement has been growing, but apparently only one particular type of raw food is being singled out for armed raids.  Can we guess the reason?

But raw milk in particular has drawn a lot of regulatory scrutiny, largely because the politically powerful dairy industry has pressed the government to act.

That's all from this LA Times article.  This article offers more details.

When the 20 agents arrived bearing a search warrant at her Ventura County farmhouse door at 7 a.m. on a Wednesday a couple weeks back, Sharon Palmer didn't know what to say. This was the third time she was being raided in 18 months, and she had thought she was on her way to resolving the problem over labeling of her goat cheese that prompted the other two raids. (In addition to producing goat's milk, she raises cattle, pigs, and chickens, and makes the meat available via a CSA.)

But her 12-year-old daughter, Jasmine, wasn't the least bit tongue-tied. "She started back-talking to them," recalls Palmer. "She said, 'If you take my computer again, I can't do my homework.' This would be the third computer we will have lost. I still haven't gotten the computers back that they took in the previous two raids."

The tactics of the war on drugs meets rent seeking industry lobbyists.  Radley Balko has documented ad nauseum (often literally) the abuses that local and federal law enforcement inflict on us daily.  150 Swat raids every 24 hours, on average.  The average joe thinks, well, they're all drug dealers and criminals.  Except when highly trained expert law enforcement personnel get the wrong address, or guy, and while they're there, they shoot the dog.  Using these tactics to enforce a milk cartel that already makes us all pay more for milk seems yet wronger.

If any sufficiently connected lobby or influence group can get the right laws passed, they have highly aggressive and none-to-smart police to enforce them, and who don't seem particularly concerned about their fellow-citizen's rights.  Frankly, it's a miracle that the dozens of raids these articles have talked about haven't resulted in injuries or puppycide.