Photo by Lennart Tange. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says that HHS and the US Food and Drug Administration will phase out the use of petroleum-based food dyes over the next two years to “Make America Healthy Again.”

Of all the policy changes coming out of Washington DC, this is probably the most visible — literally.

If the changes go as planned, a lot of the foods you eat, liquids you drink, and medications you take will probably look a lot different than you’ve become used to.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well, it depends on who you ask.

For decades, scientists have researched — and lobbyists and activists have fought over — the effects of those artificial colorants on Americans’ health. Some researchers and advocates claim links between artificial food colorings and various disorders. The companies using those colorings, naturally, deny such links.

In the 1990s, I knew a couple who did everything they could to keep Red Dye 40 out of their son’s diet. He’d been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. They believed (upon observation I had to agree) that getting the food coloring out of his diet greatly relieved his inability to sit still, concentrate, etc. That’s just anecdotal, of course, but the differences did seem dramatic.

Chicken or egg? Did consumers nudge food makers to give their products the “pop” of more brilliant colors, or did that “pop” condition consumers to associate bright hues with quality?

Would we buy fruit-flavored cereal if it didn’t come in a mix of reds, yellows, purples, and green?

Would we want those gummy bears or shell-covered candies if they were off-white?

I don’t claim to know, but color’s what they’re selling and we buy a LOT of it.

I don’t support a ban.

As long as sellers truthfully disclose what they’re putting in their products, we’re free to buy or not buy — and one positive outcome of the “information age” is that we have instant access to both scientific information and others’ opinion (well-informed or not) on the ingredients in our food.

In the normal course of things, I might or might not give credence to RFK Jr.’s opinion on the matter when deciding what to put in my shopping cart and in my body. You might or might not as well. That’s fine. What’s not fine is him just deciding for all of us, whether we like it or not.

Most of us aren’t old enough to remember, but at one time many states required margarine to be dyed bright pink as a way of discouraging its use versus butter (as you might guess, the dairy industry lobby backed such laws).

It’s not a hill to dye on (see what I did there?), I guess. I’m sure we’ll get used to the changes in how our food looks.  Maybe we really will get healthier physically — who knows?  But letting a politician control our choices this way is a worse disease than any malady associated with food coloring.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Article III of the US Constitution provides for congressional establishment of “inferior courts” — that is, courts other than the Supreme Court — and for congressional regulation of those courts’ jurisdictions.

In that sense, there’s nothing unusual about US Senator Mike Lee’s proposal for a streamlined appellate process where actions “commenced against the executive seeking injunctive or declaratory relief against the Executive,” other than the stilted writing and mismatched capitalization.

The problem Lee’s trying to solve, if it really is a problem, is that individual US District Court judges can, and sometimes do, issue injunctions with nationwide effect.

Lee’s proposal would require such actions to be heard by panels of three judges rather than by a single judge, with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court selecting the judges. It would also require the Supreme Court to hear all appeals of injunctions issued by those panels.

No problem, I guess. It seems well within Congress’s powers as described above.

Unfortunately, Lee decided to give the bill a title that doesn’t match its effect. He’s calling it “The Restraining Judicial Insurrectionists Act of 2025.”

“Insurrection” has remained much on the public mind since 2021 when outgoing US president Donald Trump was accused of fomenting one with his January 6 “Stop The Steal” rally preceding the notorious Beer Belly Putsch, also known as the Capitol riot and, by many, simply as “the insurrection.”

Some unsuccessful attempts to bar Trump from the 2024 ballot as an “insurrectionist” followed, and Trump, now in his second term, recently took up the word himself, asking the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to report to him with recommendations on “whether to invoke the Insurrection Act” so that he can use the armed forces to enforce his domestic immigrant abduction and deportation efforts (both departments are recommending against such an invocation).

It kinda feels like Lee wants to pander to Trump’s newfound fascination with “insurrection,” and that’s clearly working (Trump publicly agrees with Lee on the existence of something called “judicial insurrection” ).

Federal judges doing what federal judges are, at the moment, authorized to do (issue injunctions) based on what they’re constitutionally bound to support (due process) doesn’t really seem very insurrectiony,  though.

Can you think of something, anything, that sounds more like an “insurrection” — defined as “obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States?”

How about a rogue president and his co-conspirators invoking an extra-constitutional and ahistorical “unitary executive” claim to justify ignoring — when they’re not openly violating — laws they don’t like, in violation of the chief executive’s constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed?”

Trump, as Trump likes very much to do, is accusing others of doing what he’s actually doing himself in hopes of getting away with mischief.

As an anarchist, I’ve got no problem with insurrection as such. I’d just prefer insurrection in support of, rather than against, liberty. I guess the fake judicial insurrection looks a little more like that than the real Trump insurrection. But not much.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

As of market close April 21, major US stock indices have fallen by double-digit percentages since the beginning of the year, while bond yields — the interest rates the US government owes on money it borrows — continue to rise. But US president Donald Trump wants the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates and bears an ongoing grudge against the central bank’s chair, Jerome Powell, for refusing to do so.

In Trump’s view,  “Mr. Too Late, a major loser” should, but isn’t, “pre-emptively” acting with sufficient alacrity to rescue the American economy from the consequences of Trump’s own economic idiocy.

Powell makes a convenient scapegoat, especially since he can’t be fired (though Trump occasionally pretends otherwise) and has more than a year left in his term. So until May of 2026, Trump can just continue blaming Powell for America’s economic pain instead of admitting that his tariff and trade war antics, spendthrift budget plans, etc. don’t, won’t, and can’t produce good results.

Powell and his co-conspirators at the Fed aren’t innocent bystanders. To the extent that inflation “is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” as Milton Friedman correctly put it, they have plenty to answer for.

That said, the perpetual Trump-Powell boxing match misses the real problem.

The Fed shouldn’t lower — or raise — interest rates.

The Fed should dissolve, or be dissolved, and the job of “creating money” should be left entirely to a free market.

There’s simply not enough room in an op-ed column to explain the intricate processes through which the Fed has debased the value of American money over the last 112 years, but lengthy explanations aren’t really necessary. The results of giving a banking cartel a monopoly on the creation of “money,” the power to create that “money” from thin air, and a mandate to loan that “money” to politicians who can borrow as much as they want as often as they want, were predictable from the start.

When we look at the three main functions of money — medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value — the Federal Reserve system’s product fails on two of the three.

Sure, the dollar serves as a convenient unit of account, but it’s continually and consistently worth less and less in exchange and as savings. And these days, near-instant information transfer makes it easy to compare units of account. There’s no particular reason why a troy ounce of gold or silver, a Bitcoin, or any fraction of any of those three, or any number of other instruments, can’t serve the unit of account function at least as well as the dollar, while holding their value far better in exchange and savings.

The dollar — like many other government and government-sponsored projects — continues to circle the drain, and WILL eventually go down that drain.

Expecting Trump, Congress, et al. to give up their tickets on the “free money” gravy train before the train wreck is unrealistic. But YOU can, and should, get as much of your wealth and economic activity as possible off that train.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY