Government’s notions of what is healthy are not always based on the best science. Take the idiotic food pyramid, for example, which will leave many people protein-deprived and fat-deprived. In fact, the maker of the current USDA pyramid doesn’t seem to understand the concept of a food pyramid at all.

Are you really trying to equate a response from a person who was not willing to accept responsibility for their choices and actions (Cain killing Abel) to those who are willing to accept responsibility for their choices and actions (those who choose to drink raw milk)?

A free society requires people to take personal responsibility for themselves and give them the freedom to make choices. But we have chosen as a society to intervene when people make bad choices that we think may cause them great harm. We ban heroin. We make people wear seat belts. Sometimes we do so because it it helps protect us all. But sometimes we do it just because we think the choice is so poor we should intervene. You have to give your kid a blood transfusion if she needs one. Period.

Sometimes we should not intervene because we balance all of the interests and decide we shouldn’t. Society draws the line in different – and sometime contradictory – ways. But we should feel a little uneasy about it when we think someone is hurting themselves and we just let it go? Yeah, I think we should even when the balance of interests says we should.

“we should also feel uneasy sometimes when we don’t coerce others and we are willing to let them harm themselves and just stay out of it.”

Why?

But the moral high horse rides both ways: we should also feel uneasy sometimes when we don’t coerce others and we are willing to let them harm themselves and just stay out of it.

However, I don’t see much risk in the consumption of raw milk in the numbers put forth by the CDC- certainly not enough to characterize it as a “poison” nor restrict its consumption.

There is also lots of information out there about how farmers use to mistreat their cows and adulter raw milk

None of this relates to 21st centry production techniques

But yes, there is a very good reason we pasteurize

As gitarcarver notes, the interest of the Wisconsin trial only begins there. Among other issues, it raises the question of how far our consciences will allow us to go in coercing other persons whose choices differ from ours. And if we feel no unease at all about coercing other persons, that tells us something too, if only about ourselves.