The drum beat of crushingly stupid regulatory efforts from the floundering Obama administration continues unabated. Now it's farmers who are being attacked.

Obama also said he will ask Congress for $1 billion in new funds to add inspectors and modernize laboratories . . .

"There are certain things only a government can do," Obama said. "And one of those things is ensuring that the foods we eat, and the medicines we take, are safe and do not cause us harm." . . .

Obama noted in his address that many of the nation's food-safety laws "have not been updated since they were written in the time of Teddy Roosevelt," and said the FDA was "underfunded and understaffed" during Bush's tenure. . .

Consumer groups, food-safety advocates, patients' organizations and others from across the political spectrum praised the choice of Hamburg and Sharfstein for the FDA, which has struggled to retain public confidence amid outbreaks of food-borne illnesses, poisoning scares and drug controversies. The FDA is charged with overseeing the safety of most foods, medical devices, and prescription and over-the-counter drugs, which together amount to about 25 percent of all consumer spending. . . .

This is a WaPo tongue bath that fails to report accurately or explore the implications. Others are stepping up.

The blogosphere is buzzing with comments on the legislation, including the following:

• Obama and his cronies or his puppetmasters are trying to take total control – nationalize everything, disarm the populace, control food, etc. We are seeing the formation of a total police state.
• Well ... that's not very " green " of Obama. What's his real agenda?
• This is getting way out of hand! Isn't it enough the FDA already allows poisons in our foods?
• If you're starving, no number of guns will enable you to stay free. That's the whole idea behind this legislation. He who controls the food really makes the rules.
• The government is terrified of the tax loss. Imagine all the tax dollars lost if people actually grew their own vegetables! Imagine if people actually coordinated their efforts with family, friends and neighbors. People could be in no time eating for the price of their own effort. ... Oh the horror of it all! The last thing the government wants is for us to be self-sufficient.
• They want to make you dependent upon government. I say no way! already the government is giving away taxes from my great great grandchildren and now they want to take away my food, my semi-auto rifles, my right to alternative holistic medicine? We need a revolution, sheeple! Wake up! They want fascism ... can you not see that?
• The screening processes will make it very expensive for smaller farmers, where bigger agriculture corporations can foot the bill.
• If anything it just increases accountability, which is arguably a good thing. It pretty much says they'll only confiscate your property if there are questions of contamination and you don't comply with their inspections. I think the severity of this has been blown out of proportion by a lot of conjecture.
• Don't waste your time calling the criminals in D.C. and begging them to act like humans. This will end with a bloody revolt.
• The more I examine this (on the surface) seemingly innocuous bill the more I hate it. It is a coward's ploy to push out of business small farms and farmers markets without actually making them illegal because many will choose not to operate due to the compliance issue.

It is reasonable to argue that our regulatory system for foods needs reform, but the Democrats are going in the wrong direction, making things worse. See Joel Salatin's rant Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal to get some grasp of the issue.

As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal’s office.

And it doesn’t stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process. . .

Every T-bone steak has to be wrapped in a half-million dollar facility so that it can be sold to your neighbor. The fact that I can do it on my own farm more cleanly, more responsibly, more humanely, more efficiently, and in a more environmentally friendly manner doesn’t matter to the government agents who walk around with big badges on their jackets and wheelbarrow-sized regulations tucked under their arms.

Never waste a crisis, as the Obamaniacs chant, and so they are exploiting peanut butter and spinach to implement draconian new regulations, in the time honored tradition of machine politicians in collusion with monied interests.

The NYT recently published an op-ed in honor of the 100th anniversary of publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. . .

“The Jungle,” and the campaign that Sinclair waged after its publication, led directly to passage of a landmark federal food safety law, which took effect 100 years ago this week. Sinclair awakened a nation not just to the dangers in the food supply, but to the central role government has to play in keeping it safe.

The only problem with the official version is that it's just about a 180-degree reversal of the truth in every detail. To get around the Art Schlesinger mythology, all you have to do is read Gabriel Kolko's The Triumph of Conservatism, a brilliant work of New Left history on the role of the regulated industries in formulating "The Great Trust-Buster's" regulatory agenda. You see, the big meatpackers were already subject to a federal inspection regime. The federal government had adopted the older system at their behest in the late nineteenth century, when an embarrassing tainted meat scandal threatened their market in Europe. The federal government at the time adopted inspection regulations for all meatpackers engaged in the export trade. It was a classic example of cartelization through the state: the meat exporters, which happened to be the largest firms, for all intents and purposes adopted an industry code enforced by the state. It was exactly the kind of code an industry might have adopted on its own initiative, with the added benefit of being non-defectable. So the costs of compliance were not a competitive issue between the big packers. There was only one drawback: it didn't apply to the small packers that didn't produce for the export market. What TR's Meat Inspection Act did was bring the small packers into the regime, to remove the competitive advantage they received from their exemption.

Bizarre. At a time when there are many good arguments for de-industrializing agriculture and increasing local food production the last thing we need is an army of regulators crawling up our butts and creating further consolidation of agriculture.

See Cheese Food for a discussion of the same subject a couple of years ago.