The Paleo-Libertarian Connection

Here is an interesting article discussing the connection between being paleo, and being a libertarian.

From LewRockwell.com:

As a libertarian who discovered the paleo approach to health a couple of years ago, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find a solid contingent of libertarians in the paleo community. I’ve come to call such people paleo-libertarians (the hyphen distinguishes us from the paleolibertarians). Some of the big names in the paleo movement are principled anti-statists, including Kurt Harris,Richard Nikoley, and Don Matesz. Paleo is rapidly gaining popularity, and there are a growing number of paleo-libertarians.

Paleos Against the State

In fact, the paleo health community is astonishingly libertarian, if only unconsciously so. Of course, there are many statists, but the libertarian presence is disproportionately large. Paleos generally reserve a special hatred for the state. After all, the state and its allies in academia and industry are spreading deadly health advice that is responsible for the bulk of disease and obesity, and it continues to do so in the face of a growing mountain of evidence contradicting it. It should have been obvious from the start that the conventional wisdom was bogus – it totally contradicts evolutionary biology. The conventional recommendation to avoid red meat and animal fat, for example, flies in the face of over 2 million years of evolutionary adaptation to eating animals (the whole animal, including all of the fat). The recommendations to eat grains and vegetable oils are also suspect – grains were only introduced into the human diet about 10,000 years ago, and vegetable oils haven’t even existed for more than a century. The state’s health advice is not only wrong, but directly harmful to health. That makes the state responsible for an unfathomable amount of misery and death. For paleos, this elicits a deep mistrust in the state – how can they trust that the state doesn’t screw up this badly in anything else it does?

Read the rest here.

Bookmark It

No related posts.