How Governments Create Epidemics
By: Leland Stillman
Tags: Politics, Policy, Health, Food, Corruption

How Governments Create Epidemics

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If you have ever wondered how obesity, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, allergies, cancer, and heart disease, just to name a few, have become so rampant in our society, then look no further than Washington, DC. This blog post will explain how the government is manufacturing diseases, and is part two of a three part series. Part one is here and part three is here.

I know everyone wants to blame the government these days, but when it comes to creating epidemics of disease, no one outdoes the government. How, you ask? And why would they do such a thing?

As you might have guessed, it all starts with money. An industry discovers that something it is selling to the public at a huge profit is incredibly bad for the public. They quickly manufacture some “science” to say that it is safe, or even beneficial. They use this to befuddle government bureaucrats and give politicians enough “plausible deniability” to go along with letting them get away with their onerous business model. In return, they generously fund political careers. Next, they find great reasons to fund whatever it is they are selling with tax-payer dollars. They say it’s “for the children,” even when it is the worst thing for the children. They pillory politicians, pundits, and experts who call them out for this kind of rent-seeking, corrupt, and evil behavior. They call them heartless monsters who don’t care about “the children.”

This is the basic anatomy of “business as usual” in modern American business. Yet over the course of history, enough of these cases have accumulated to give us a picture of just what they are doing and how they are doing it. The bodies are piled high enough and deep enough that no one believes in the altruism of the corporation any longer, much less that of elected politicians or unaccountable bureaucrats.

Factory farming provides a perfect example of this. I studied factory farming, specifically hog farming, and its public health effects as an undergraduate at Connecticut College. This is where I first saw how the sausage of modern diseases was made (pun intended).

A hundred years ago, hog farming was distributed uniformly across the United States. The average person was a farmer, or at least a gardener, and having your own pigs, chickens, or herds of beef cattle was not uncommon. Neighbors fed one another — food didn’t have to travel far to reach its final destination. This system was the model of efficiency, even if productivity was not what it is today. Synthetic or petroleum-based fertilization did not exist. Manure and other organic matter, after composting, served as fertilizer. Water had to be obtained from the natural environment. Run-off — fertilizer dumping into rivers and lakes to pollute them — was simply not a problem because those nutrients were scarce and, therefore, valuable. Insects and birds abounded — decades later, they would be silenced by DDT and pesticides. America’s environment was blemished only by its fledgling industry, which over the next hundred or so years would do its own damage.

After World War II, the nation’s munitions industry began to produce fertilizer using the same chemical reactions. This fueled the rise of modern agribusiness, which reached its apotheosis in Monsanto. Meanwhile, the government began to regulate what farmers grew, how they grew it, how and where they sold it, and what price it sold for. While there is still nominal freedom in America’s agricultural markets, the truth is that the government effectively controls all agriculture in the United States through its bureaucracy. This started with regulations and laws that restricted how farmers could sell their products, and has since expanded to include a dizzying array of subsidies, regulations, and government agencies to administer and enforce them (read: government waste). This includes food stamps provisioned by the federal government and food aid to foreign nations.

This means that the government has substantial control over what the public eats, and therefore over their health and wellness. The average American family today struggles to eat healthy in a nation where unhealthy food is cheap and widely available. To a doctor who spends his days mitigating the damage done to the average American by the modern American agricultural system, this is outrageous and unacceptable (but don’t hold your breath for meaningful, balanced media coverage of the farm bill).

Photo by Zac Nielson on Unsplash

How does this work with factory farming?

First, cheap energy prices and public roads make it possible to rapidly transport agricultural products, such as feed for hogs or hogs for slaughter or finished pork products, all over the world. Local farmers can suddenly be out-competed by farmers half-way across the world, who may undercut them thanks to government subsidies, favorable growing conditions, or differences in wages and costs of living. How are American farmers supposed to compete with, say, Mexican farmers? And if Mexico has abundant arable land, cheap labor, and areas rich in water, then will Mexico one day be the bread-basket of America? To anyone with a mind for thermodynamics and bioenergetics, this arrangement is sub-optimal, to say the least. It introduces massive risks to both systems — something we will discuss in a later post.

The people who suffer from the pollution caused by that cheap energy bear the cost of it, rather than those who make money from polluting industries. In this way, governments allow industries to exploit the public, arguably for “the greater good.” The federal government’s incestuous relationship with the energy industry is no secret. It is such an open scandal that no one pretends it is otherwise.

Second, cheap energy prices make for cheap fertilizer and pesticides. These are integral to creating cheap feed to supply factor farms. Just look at the latest settlements from Monsanto over its glyphosate pesticide for an idea of the cost of such “cheap” feed. It is only cheap for the farmer when they buy it — it is expensive when the farmer gets cancer, which may bankrupt him before it kills him.

Third, the government provides a complex system of tax cuts, benefits, and subsidies to farmers. Once upon a time, this money actually went to farmers. Now, it is being collected increasingly by a class of wealthy land-owners who have nothing to do with farming. These subsidies, in addition to cheap energy, lead to depressed prices for foods that are produced cheaply, en-masse, and at great cost to the environment.

Corporations have accurately perceived this trend and have enthusiastically engaged in rent-seeking and agency capture. Rent-seeking is when corporations convince the government to create regulatory conditions favorable to that corporation. For example, they might bribe politicians to increase subsidies to GMO corn. This is of no tangible benefit to the people — quite to the contrary, it creates a glut of cheap food that is loaded with sugar and fake ingredients as “filler.” Agency capture occurs when corporations install their own agents among government regulators. The United States Department of Agriculture has had an unhealthy relationship with Monsanto and other large agribusinesses since before I was born. The end result is government policies that serve corporate interests, rather than public interests.

How has this played out? The top two items today bought with food stamps are soda and junk food. Soda and junk food are fueling our epidemics of diabetes and obesity. Yet this is what our tax dollars are being used for to feed our most vulnerable, unhealthy citizens! Using food stamps to buy junk food and soda is like using forestry management funds to buy gasoline and napalm, then delivering it to tinder-dry Western forests via C-130 cargo planes. I am tempted to call it genocide, so vast is the scale of the damage that is being done.

The poor in America used to eat wholesome, local food. Now, only the middle and upper classes can afford such food — all thanks to how your tax dollars are spent and federal (and some state) regulations have been structured.

This is just one example of how governments create disease. I have used the example of factory farming here, but could just as easily have used artificial light, radio or microwaves, cell phones, modern air travel, the interstate system, and many more, to discuss how governments create massive risks for society, which ultimately blow up into epidemics of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and so on. The result is a modern America that is on the verge of bankruptcy of both its health and its wealth — the exact opposite of our position just one hundred years ago.

It could have all turned out very differently — so why didn’t it?

Governments naturally love technology. Technology enables governments, as it does individuals, to do new and exciting things. The power and success of any government is in part dependent upon its technological sophistication. You would be hard-pressed to administer to a nation like the United States using stone-age tools. Beyond simple day to day administration, modern defense depends upon sophisticated technologies that require a certain amount of collateral damage to our environment. Today, the fabric of our lives and how we govern our societies depends upon technology.

This love affair, however, leads the state to make catastrophic errors in understanding the value of certain technologies. There is a risk-benefit ratio for any choice in life, no less to those that can be made by the state and enforced throughout its dominion. These risks, however, are hidden. They are difficult to foresee. Ultimately, they all arise from the first principles of biology.

Darwin’s central contention was that the conditions of existence shape life on earth. Necessarily, any alteration to those conditions imposes a stress upon life, and therefore reduces fitness and longevity. This is an inconvenient truth for civilization. Note that it is not a reason to throw technology out the window — the baby with the bath water — but it is a reason to pause and ask ourselves why the state should have any role in telling us what is good or what is bad, let alone setting prices or providing subsidies.

Many people today want to give the federal government unprecedented control over our lives, be it through our healthcare or our agricultural system. How anyone could want to give such power to such a morally bankrupt and indefensible institution boggles my mind. They are literally subsidizing and enabling our modern epidemics, while paying lip-service to our ideals of “freedom” and “liberty.” There is no excuse for continuing to support policies that make unhealthy food cheap and ubiquitous, when policies could just as easily be enacted that made healthy food cheap and available for all — not just those who can afford to shop at Whole Foods.

When you remove the American government from the picture, you begin to see that small, local farmers can easily meet our needs for food today, just as they did before. Ironically, farmers have come to loathe the system that once made them rich, because that same system has since been turned against them. Farmer suicides and bankruptcies are at all time highs, while farm incomes are declining. These are merely the symptoms of an empire on the verge of collapse.

Civilization always returns to its roots. Hundreds of years after the fall of Rome, animals were pastured in its ruins. Urban populations declined, or decentralized (although many died of plague and starvation — more on this in subsequent blog posts). Instead of drawing their food from the flood plains of the Nile in Egypt, Romans returned to feeding themselves locally.

I foresee an inevitable return to local food production that is organic and sustainable. Skeptics of this tend to be devotees of “scientism” who do not understand complex systems. The economics are clear — what we would spend on food we would save many-fold on healthcare costs. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” as the saying goes.

Once you see just how governments and corporations cooperate to create the perfect environment for disease, you ask yourself, “what if they just got out of the way? What if I were free to buy and sell health insurance as it made sense to me?”

Having meditated upon this question for many years now, I have come to believe that, if given the opportunity, I could insure every American for less than they currently insure their car.

Stay tuned for Manufacturing Disease, Part 3, where I will explain how.