Category: davenoon

The Road to Serfdom

Conservatives have evidently worked themselves into something of an incoherent snit over the FDA’s plans to limit sodium in processed foods. If I understand the anxiety correctly, a cooperative effort between the federal government, industry representatives and public health experts to gradually (and I would imagine quite modestly) reduce sodium levels over a ten-year period is pretty much the sort of thing that Pol Pot did before depopulating the cities and having everyone gouged to death with bamboo.

As a public health matter, reducing sodium levels in the food supply seems like a perfectly decent idea and would be the most efficient way of addressing the problems caused by a diet overloaded with salt. Americans consume more sodium (by most estimates twice, by some estimates three times) than we need; most of our sodium comes from processed food; the epidemiological data demonstrate a compelling link between excessive sodium intake and unpleasant health outcomes like coronary heart disease and stroke (among other misfortunes); gradual reductions sodium intake seem to have measurable benefits for blood pressure; and the best available evidence suggests that we might reduce deaths from CHD, stroke and heart attack by tens of thousands (if not more) simply by knocking back average sodium consumption to the levels currently recommended by the CDC (i.e., 2300 mg/day for the general population). Although there’s the usual degree of uncertainty and qualification in the science, critics of the policies being mulled over by the FDA — most notably Michael Alderman, who has long been the go-to guy for salt regulation skeptics — are well-known within the field for overstating the ambiguity in the data and for undervaluing the weight of randomized clinical studies that support the public health consensus on sodium reduction. (That’s not to say he’s a hack, or that the debate about sodium is anything as nonexistent as the “debate” about climate change. Indeed, when boneheads like Ed Morrissey cite his work as “the latest research” — while completely botching his academic affiliation — it’s difficult not to take pity on the guy and wonder if he’s not being ill-served by the attention.)

in any event, there’s obviously always room for debate about the potential efficacy of public policy — but it’s probably not a debate worth having with people harboring primal fears that Barack Obama is coming to steal their Funyuns. Unfortunately, that seems to be the level at which the public discourse about food and public health usually takes place, so wingnuts should at least take heart in that.

UPDATE [SL]: In today’s installment of non-sequitur theater, William Jacobson announces that this plan to set modest limits on the amount of sodium in pre-processed foods totally vindicates his fear that isolated legislators will be able to completely ban the use of salt in restaurants. And, also, giving consumers the ability to control the amount of salt in their food is just the prelude to banning the private use of salt, or something. As a mere political scientist, I must confess that I can’t really follow the logic here.

UPDATE THE SECOND [SL]: See also.

“The conflict between slavery and non-slavery is a conflict between life and death.”

Well, sheeeeeeeeeeyit.  It’s Treason-in-Defense-of-Slavery Heritage Month again, so I suppose we need to remind people like Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell what the “shared history” of Virginia’s Confederate heroes actually entailed. Here’s a choice excerpt from a speech given at Virginia’s February 1861 secession convention by the South Carolinian John Preston, one of the Confederacy’s great apostles of disunion:

You may, as you are at this moment doing, centralize a coercive power at Washington stronger than the Praetorian bands when the Roman eagles shadowed the earth “from Lusitania to the Caucasus,” but you cannot come nearer coalescing the people of Virginia and the people of Vermont, the people of the St Lawrence and the people of the Gulf, than did Rome to make one of the Gaul and the Dacian, the Briton and the Ionian. No community of origin, no community of language, law or religion, can amalgamate a people whose severance is proclaimed by the rigid requisitions of material necessity. Nature forbids African slavery at the North. Southern civilization cannot exist without African slavery. None but an equal race can labor at the South. Destroy involuntary labor and Anglo Saxon civilization must be remitted to the latitudes whence it sprung.

Preston’s speech sent the audience at Mechanics Institute Hall into peals of ecstasy; Richmond newspapers praised his logic. He was unable to convince the delegation to vote in favor of disunion, but when it finally did so less than two months later, it did so entirely within the spirit of that February address. The fact that McDonnell is recognizing — and I think pretty clearly celebrating — the Lost Cause is at some level no better or worse than what Georgia or Mississippi does each year.  At the same time, however, Virginia’s importance to the entire history of the Confederacy means that, for McDonnell, hailing the state’s role in the Confederacy means hailing the state’s role in assuring that the entire nation suffered through a war that killed well over 600,000 people and took four years to conclude.  The state was, of course, critical to the lunatic aspirations of the Deep South planter class.  Its manpower, industrial wealth and agricultural resources (to say nothing of its geographic value, perched across the Potomac from the Great Bearded Satan) were essential to the mission of preserving the institution of slavery against the imaginary assaults being made against it by the miscegenationists in the Republican party.  Lacking Virginia, the Confederacy could easily have been choked to death by a prolonged naval blockade; of course, lacking Virginia on the Confederate side, the war would probably never have turned into an abolitionist crusade, so we can at least thank Virginia’s dead sons for that much — though I don’t suppose Bob McDonnell would appreciate the more self-defeating aspects of Confederate Heritage.

In any event, and for what it’s worth, I’m proposing that April be known henceforth as West Virginia Appreciation Month. Feel free to e-mail the Governor’s office and ask him to take a few moments this April to recognize the patriotism of those nearly three dozen Virginia counties that refused to make war in defense of white supremacy.

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