Now that you are being somewhat civil, I'm wishing I had more time to engage.

Just a couple quick things and then I really have to dip from this thread, at least for now:

* You are using the word "strawman," but I don't think you actually mean strawman. I think you are trying to describe a slippery slope. Strawman is a fallacy wherein one debater misrepresents the position of another, and then uses this weaker misrepresentation as the basis for a response. In fact, it's exactly what you are doing when you say "oh that's easy - the hegemonic empire doesn't want its stormtroopers - that would be its population - to die, because they can't fight for hte hegemonic empire or pay their taxes" - this is a position I didn't take, don't hold, and which weakens your position to argue against. You are talking to a wall.

* You say:

> I'm not okay with someone arguing a position that I have to start reading labels on my fruits to make sure I don't die.

...and I'm just given pause because it's almost like you aren't living in the same world as the rest of us.

You do need to read labels. There are poisons in food. People do die from food - quick, sickening deaths like from e-coli in fast food and, in much greater numbers, slow, miserable deaths from obesity and diabecity. Do you not realize that these are the main causes of death in our society? I mean... is it possible that this just hasn't occurred to you? You made direct reference to it in your comment, but the points seems to have been lost on you.

So, on one hand, the FDA has failed to stop toxic food from becoming the biggest cause of premature death in society.

On the other hand, the FDA, along with its state counterparts, have stopped low-cost, healthy food from entering the food supply and threatening the quasi-monopolies held by a few small, giant corporate agriculture sponsors.

To pull out just one example - but you can find more every day across the country - just down the road from where I sit in Michigan: the Michigan Dept. of Agriculture actually forced a farm co-op to dump hundreds of gallons of milk and to destroy over a thousand free-range eggs because they were deemed for 'sale' instead the property of the co-op:

http://www.wnem.com/story/26116053/farmers-forced-to-dump-pr...

I want to give you the benefit of the doubt here; maybe you just didn't realize these things were happening. But it's bad. The food is bad, and it's mostly various arms of the government that are making it so.

And please, bottle the acid with your stormtroopers bit. It's much simpler than that, of course: it's about money. There's no complex shroud of intent here. Huge agricultural companies pay the government to make their products the only game in town. It's really not much more complicated than that.

This is par for the course; there is no example in history of government making the food supply safer, and even less so in the center of empire. As a habit, empires push unhealthy food and drugs on their own populous and that of their colonies. This is the basic dynamic of the opium war, of alcohol prohibition, and of drug prohibition today.

At the end of the day, I prefer that it be legal for people to sell ridiculous, snake-oily products, even unto properly labeled arsenic apples, then to have to choose between subsidized poison and scarce real food.

Arsenic apples are not a threat to food security. Nobody will even try to sell them. And if they do, nobody will buy them. Hill High Dairy being shut down is a threat to food security.

These are not hypotheticals; these are the actual choices we have to make about the role, if any, for government to play in assisting adults in securing healthy food.