Pennsylvania taxpayers foot the bill for the continued persecution of an Amish farmer
I've been writing about Amos Miller's never-ending abuse at the hands of armed SWAT teams for - GASP! - raw milk that he sells to a private club. Or did until the government threw a hissy fit.
"Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned." Milton Friedman knew the mindset of the unaccountable thugs at the Pennsylvania Department of Arbitrary Oppression, er, Agriculture. These petty brats just cannot stand it that an Amish farmer is selling his organic produce directly to a private buyers club. It riles their shriveled little hearts and they’re spending millions of taxpayer dollars to pester and ruin a man with hundreds of supportive customers. How are Pennsylvania taxpayers putting up with this ridiculousness?
As one guy in the video put it, "You go into a grocery store and the shelves are lined with poison. We've got an obesity epidemic, and the government is spending money persecuting an organic farmer selling natural food to people well aware of the risks."
It is insane.
Are any of you sensing a pattern? One more situation with no victims, no crime and yet the government is torturing a citizen because some bureaucrat wrote a rule - not some legislature debated and passed a law - which suddenly makes an average person a “criminal” according to some arcane statute.
Chevron deference1 must end once and for all. At all levels of government, the citizens must demand that elected legislators are the only source of any law or rule which impacts our lives.
Today it is Amos Miller. Tomorrow it could be you.
One of the most important principles in administrative law, the “Chevron deference” was coined after a landmark case, Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 468 U.S. 837 (1984). The Chevron deference is referring to the doctrine of judicial deference given to administrative actions. In Chevron, the Supreme Court set forth a legal test as to when the court should defer to the agency’s answer or interpretation, holding that such judicial deference is appropriate where the agency’s answer was not unreasonable, so long as Congress had not spoken directly to the precise issue at question.
There is plenty more to the topic (e.g. Chevron deference | Wex | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute (cornell.edu)) but in general, the massive abuses of the administrative state occur because unelected, unaccountable, usually anonymous bureaucrats have been given the power to put any of us in jail, seize our assets and fine us into oblivion. It’s abhorrent and un-Constitutonal and must end.