Essay 18-C: The Meat Inspection Act and Founding Documents

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

Washington, D.C. – The founders believed they had presided over the creation not just of a new nation but a new nationality: tougher, simpler, and less refined than their European forebears. These new Americans would be animated by the challenge of conquering first an Empire, then a continent, imbued with a spirit of what 19th-century philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson would refer to as “self-reliance.”

As virtuous as the exposés of muckrakers like Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell might seem to us looking backward, when they were published they added fuel to the progressive fires already undermining the values of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson’s use of the phrase “pursuit of happiness” – borrowed from British philosopher John Locke, who, in developing the idea of a social contract between the citizens and their government, referenced “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property” – is not meant to convey an image of joyful post-colonialists chasing pleasure throughout their new nation. It instead refers to a continuing state of social and civic good that it is the duty of every American to reinforce in our daily actions. 

Broadly expressed, that can be taken to mean our national ideal is based on the idea of “looking out for the other guy” and their interests while chasing your own share of the American Dream. We are not so much “communitarian” as we are a community, something de Tocqueville expounded upon perceptively in his landmark study “Democracy in America.”

The progressive tendencies unleashed at the end of the 19th century, brought to fruition during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, with the apparent consent of the american people, gave birth to an administrative state that, ever so slowly, has stripped away pieces of our liberty and our responsibility to our neighbors. 

No one wants “bad meat” to be sold to consumers, especially those who lack the resources to be choosy about where they shop or the education to make informed choices. At least that’s the rationale underlying the regulatory regimes created to enforce the provisions of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and other measures that established federal agencies overseeing inspection regimes intended to protect us from evil commercial suppliers only interested in profit.

Think about that. Is that really a business model that makes sense? Who among us thinks that killing your customer is a way to earn repeat business? Not to mention how that rhetoric exploits class divisions, as followers of Karl Marx would later do in turning neighbor against neighbor and countryman against countryman. In societies such as those, all men are not created equal. Some, as George Orwell would later explain in his classic Animal Farm, “are more equal than others.”

The motivation behind such legislation was likely altruistic, as it is today, when well-meaning and virtuous people suggest that various industries need even more regulation to protect the cleanliness and safety of the workplace, our environment, our healthcare system, and, yes, our multi-billion-dollar agricultural industry, which includes meat processing. 

When those concerns are put ahead of individual rights and liberties, as well as jobs and communities, as is often the case, the crisis created by the regulatory state that spawned from the works of writers like Upton Sinclair becomes clear. We do not need nor do we want beneficent, impartial government functionaries to be responsible for overseeing the choices we make in life. Aside from the fact that no such animal exists in the real world, it infringes on our freedom of personal choice. Our fundamental rights and our need to be responsible for ourselves as a self-governing people are why the Bill of Rights expressly reserves all powers not granted to the federal government to the states or the people of the states, as the 10th Amendment makes clear. 

The founders did not intend for the federal government to be a national regulator of commercial enterprise, which is one reason why the Constitution includes its “commerce clause.” The people have rights not spelled out in our founding documents, as the 9th Amendment explains explicitly, including the right to be left alone as and if they choose. The regulatory swamp created by popular consent as lawmakers were influenced by books like The Jungle interferes with that.

Peter Roff is a contributing editor at Newsweek and a Senior Fellow at several Washington-based public policy organizations. 

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