{"id":2177,"date":"2013-05-25T15:52:35","date_gmt":"2013-05-25T19:52:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/?p=2177"},"modified":"2013-05-25T15:59:58","modified_gmt":"2013-05-25T19:59:58","slug":"now-she-tells-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/now-she-tells-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Now she tells us…."},"content":{"rendered":"

….Kathleen Merrigan, who recently resigned as Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, created a bit of a stir this week when she said the latest law the government passed to “protect” us…..has the\u00a0potential to transform and even destroy small and medium sized farms.<\/p>\n

Of course, the law has a high-sounding name, (see George Orwell), \u00a0the Food Safety Modernization Act<\/em>.\u00a0 But any bill that’s put together by Big Ag and Big Government is bound to be not only bad for small farms, but consumers.\u00a0 The basic idea is to make the requirements so stringent and so expensive that only mass producers with their chemical warehouses can afford them.<\/p>\n

Apparently there’s a lot of this stuff going on in government right now.\u00a0 Note that Merrigan says people at her level are quitting across the board.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.foodsafetynews.com\/2013\/05\/merrigan-expresses-worry-about-fsmas-impact-to-agriculture\/#.UaDEG-uRhA2<\/a><\/p>\n

What happens, of course, is that the Big Guys push through a bill with all the right-sounding language, but the devil is in the details.\u00a0 And it’s the bureaucrats that put together the details, which was the understanding all along.<\/p>\n

Referring back to an earlier discussion on this blog, some of our readers make the fair point that we elect these people.\u00a0 No, only 536 of them.\u00a0 But we don’t elect the people who fill-in\u00a0the details.\u00a0 It’s the “secret government” in the departments and agencies where the damage is finally done….far beyond the reach of our ballots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

….Kathleen Merrigan, who recently resigned as Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, created a bit of a stir this week when she said the latest law the government passed to “protect” us…..has the\u00a0potential to transform and even destroy small and medium sized farms. Of course, the law has a high-sounding name, (see George Orwell), \u00a0the Food Safety Modernization Act.\u00a0 But any bill that’s put together by Big Ag and Big Government is bound to be not only bad for small farms, but consumers.\u00a0 The basic idea is to make the requirements so stringent and so expensive that only mass producers with their chemical warehouses can afford them. Apparently there’s a lot of this stuff going on in government right now.\u00a0 Note that Merrigan says people at her level are quitting across the board. http:\/\/www.foodsafetynews.com\/2013\/05\/merrigan-expresses-worry-about-fsmas-impact-to-agriculture\/#.UaDEG-uRhA2 What happens, of course, is that the Big Guys push through a bill with all the right-sounding language, but the devil is in the details.\u00a0 And it’s the bureaucrats that put together the details, which was the understanding all along. Referring back to an earlier discussion on this blog, some of our readers make the fair point that we elect these people.\u00a0 No, only 536 of them.\u00a0 But we don’t elect the people who fill-in\u00a0the details.\u00a0 It’s the “secret government” in the departments and agencies where the damage is finally done….far beyond the reach of our ballots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,27,9,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-government","category-health","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2177"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2179,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2177\/revisions\/2179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}