What Does “Processed Meat” Actually Mean?

This essay is Part Two of the series“The Processed Meat Problem.”Part One is linked below:“Part One: The Death of Virginia Ham”Audio Version:For thousands of years, virtually every culture on Earth processed meat. Without doing so, civilization itself would have looked very different. Salting, smoking, drying, fermenting, and aging meat were among humanity’s oldest food technologies, allowing families to survive winters, feed armies, travel long distances, and build thriving communities. In other words, processing meat is not a modern invention. It is one of mankind’s oldest survival skills.Yet today, the phrase “processed meat” has taken on an entirely different meaning.Processed meat is associated with cancer.Processed meat is associated with heart disease.Processed meat is associated with diabetes and shorter lifespan.The phrase “processed meat” has become so familiar that we rarely stop to ask what it actually means. That is unfortunate, because the answer is surprisingly complicated.In everyday conversation, “processed” has become almost synonymous with “factory-made.” We picture conveyor belts, stainless steel machinery, preservatives, additives, and shrink-wrapped packages under fluorescent supermarket lights. That image certainly depicts some, maybe most, processed meats in America, but it tells only part of the story.Strictly speaking, every country ham is processed.Every piece of bacon is processed.Prosciutto di Parma is processed.Jamón Ibérico is processed.Traditional salami is processed.Even the Virginia country hams that hung in smokehouses throughout the Blue Ridge for generations were processed.The historic processing for many of these meats is simply salt, smoke, air, and time.Different cultures solved the problem in different ways, but the underlying biology was remarkably similar.Salt drew water from the meat and from the microorganisms that cause spoilage. As moisture declines, bacteria find it increasingly difficult to grow. Drying reduced water activity even further, making the meat an even less hospitable environment for pathogens. Smoke deposited compounds on the surface that helped slow spoilage while contributing flavor. Fermentation enlisted beneficial bacteria to acidify the meat, creating conditions that discouraged more dangerous organisms. Time allowed enzymes already present within the muscle to slowly transform texture and flavor, turning tough cuts into foods that could command extraordinary prices.By the Middle Ages, entire regional cuisines had developed around these preservation techniques. Italy gave us prosciutto. Spain perfected Jamón Ibérico and Jamón Serrano. Germany developed hundreds of smoked and fermented sausages. France produced jambon sec and saucisson. Across the British Isles, Northern Europe, and eventually colonial America, every farming community developed its own methods for preserving pork. Virginia country ham belongs to that ancient tradition. No two hams were exactly alike, and that was part of their appeal. That philosophy began to change during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The transformation did not occur because traditional curing suddenly stopped working. It occurred because America itself changed.Refrigerated transportation replaced local markets.National grocery chains replaced neighborhood butchers.Consumers increasingly expected the same product every time they opened a package, whether they lived in Richmond, Chicago, or Los Angeles.Product conformity at the national branding level became a major marketing tool.Self-stability saves money.At the same time, processors faced growing pressure to reduce costs, shorten production time, minimize spoilage, and produce food that could be distributed across an entire continent and even globally.One of the technologies that emerged from this period was the widespread use of sodium nitrite. Many people assume nitrite became common because the government required it. It did not.The word “processed” gradually came to describe foods that shared very little beyond the fact that someone, somewhere, had altered them after slaughter.A Virginia country ham aged for eighteen months, a Prosciutto di Parma cured with nothing more than sea salt, a traditional fermented salami, became equivalent to a supermarket deli ham injected with a curing solution, a finely emulsified hot dog, and even a can of Spam.  All are commonly classified as “processed meat.” Yet these products differ dramatically in their ingredients, methods of preservation, curing chemistry, moisture content, microbial ecology, and degree of industrial processing.That broad classification may be convenient for regulators and epidemiologists, but lumping all these products together lacks scientific precision. Grouping together traditionally preserved foods and modern industrial meat products may simplify public health messaging, but it also raises an important question: if these foods are fundamentally different, can we confidently assume they carry the same biological risks?Why America Chose NitriteOne question kept nagging at me as I researched this series.If some of the world’s most celebrated cured meats, Prosciutto di Parma, Jamón Ibérico, and even a handful of surviving American country hams, can still be produced without added sodium nitrite, why did nearly every major American producer adopt it?The answer turns out to have surprisingly little to do with government mandates.Traditional dry-cured meats can still be produced in the United States without added nitrite. The USDA never required every country ham to contain nitrite. What changed was the regulatory burden. Producers relying on traditional curing methods had to validate their process, maintain extensive documentation, and demonstrate that it consistently produced a safe product. Industrial curing methods, by contrast, were easier to standardize, easier to monitor, and easier to defend before regulators. Over time, that difference helped push much of the industry toward chemical curing, not because traditional methods no longer worked, but because they became more difficult and expensive to justify under modern regulatory systems. Regulations rarely dictate technology directly. More often, they reward the technologies that are easiest to validate, standardize, and inspect. For big industry, regulations set a higher bar for competition to enter the marketplace.  They view a higher regulatory burden as an asset, not a burden.From an economic standpoint, this industrialized manufacturing system worked remarkably well. From a public health standpoint, standardization and consistency reduce the risk of acute foodborne illness.Whether adding nitrites as well as GRAS ingredients improved overall public health, however, never seems to factor into the thinking of the CDC, FDA, or USDA, then or now, or the CDC predecessor, the U.S. Public Health Service.Once that regulatory environment existed, sodium nitrite solved an extraordinary number of problems simultaneously...It inhibits the growth ofClostridium botulinum, one of the most dangerous foodborne pathogens known. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, botulism had become one of the defining concerns of food safety and public health. Home canning received much public attention, but meat processors, researchers, and government agencies were equally focused on preventing Clostridium botulinum, the bacterium responsible for one of the deadliest known foodborne illnesses. Although foodborne botulism has always been exceedingly rare, the fear of this disease and its severity drove the search for preservation methods that could virtually eliminate the risk. Fear of botulism aligned perfectly with the economic interests of the rapidly growing processed food industry.Sodium nitrite emerged as one of the most effective tools available, and its ability to inhibitC. botulinumgrowth became a major reason for its widespread adoption throughout the American meat industry. Ironically, because systematic national surveillance of foodborne illness did not exist before the twentieth century, we can never precisely quantify how much risk nitrite actually reduced in traditional cured meats. We know the concern was real, but the historical baseline against which its benefits are measured was never adequately documented.Nitrite stabilizes the familiar pink color consumers have come to associate with cured meats. It contributes the characteristic “ham” flavor many Americans now expect. It reduces spoilage losses, improves shelf life, and allows processors to produce a more consistent product regardless of season or geography.Perhaps most importantly, nitrite fit perfectly into the industrialization of American meat production.Traditional country ham depended upon winter temperatures, experienced curing masters, carefully managed smokehouses, and months of patient aging. Every ham was slightly different. Nitrite allowed curing to become faster, more predictable, and easier to standardize across thousands… or millions of hams. In other words, nitrite was never simply a preservative.Yet not everyone followed that path.A handful of American producers, including Newsom’s Country Ham in Kentucky and artisan producers such as La Quercia in Iowa, still produce cured meats without added nitrate or nitrite, relying instead on the older combination of salt, carefully controlled drying, humidity, temperature, and time.Europe took a different path. Rather than replacing many traditional curing methods with industrial ones, countries such as Italy and Spain largely preserved them. Under the Protected Designation of Origin rules governing products such as Prosciutto di Parma and Jamón Ibérico, producers must follow extraordinarily detailed specifications governing everything from the breed of pig and region of production to curing time, temperature, humidity, and final product quality.Those products are not exempt from food safety regulations. Their traditional curing processisregulated. In the United States, regulators likewise require producers to demonstrate food safety, but American industry largely chose a different route. Technologies such as sodium nitrite, refrigeration, injected curing solutions, emulsifying agents, and standardized manufacturing made it easier to produce safe, consistent products on a much larger scale. That naturally raises another question.If both methods can safely produce exceptional cured meats, are they biologically equivalent? Remarkably, nutrition science and public health have devoted relatively little attention to answering that question.The Pig Changed TooThere is another variable almost entirely absent from discussions of processed meat, and it may be every bit as important as the curing process itself. Over the past seventy-five years, the pig has been transformed through modern genetics, breeding, and production systems. When most nutritional studies compare today’s processed meats with those consumed decades ago, they generally assume that the raw materials have remained constant. It has not. The commercial pig of the twenty-first century is a fundamentally different animal from the hogs that once wandered Virginia forests and supplied the country’s smokehouses.The transformation did not stop with curing methods. The pig itself changed.During the latter half of the twentieth century, animal breeders aggressively selected pigs for faster growth, improved feed conversion efficiency, larger loin muscles, and leaner carcasses. From an economic standpoint, it was a remarkable success. Producers could raise more pork using less feed, reducing costs while increasing production.There were unintended consequences.One of them was an increase in what meat scientists call PSE pork: pale, soft, exudative meat. Influenced by genetics, stress susceptibility, and production practices, PSE meat is pale in color, loses excessive moisture, has poor texture, and performs poorly during curing. It is far less suited to the traditional production of country ham and other dry-cured meats, which evolved around slower-growing animals carrying considerably more fat. While PSE meat is undesirable for premium whole-muscle products, many of its shortcomings can be masked when the meat is finely ground, emulsified, blended with other ingredients, and manufactured into products such as hot dogs, bologna, luncheon meats, and Spam.As a young Animal Science student at the University of California, Davis in the early 1990s, I found that this story stayed with me over time. It illustrates a broader trend within modern agriculture. Animals were increasingly being optimized for industrial efficiency rather than for the quality of the food they produced or, in many cases, for their own long-term well-being. The industry solved one problem after another through genetics, chemistry, and engineering, but each solution often created a new set of challenges that required yet another technological fix. Looking back, it is hard not to think that American agriculture, as well as public health, lost its way.Modern commercial pigs are very different animals from the hogs that once wandered Virginia woodlots.Throughout much of the twentieth century, breeding programs selected for faster growth, leaner carcasses, larger loin muscles, improved feed efficiency, and greater uniformity. Commercial breeds such as Yorkshire, Landrace, Duroc, and their crosses gradually replaced many of the slower-growing heritage breeds that had supplied American smokehouses for generations.The result was a pig that reached market weight sooner, consumed less feed per pound of grain, and produced substantially leaner carcasses. This fundamentally changed the raw material used to make traditional cured meats.The Virginia country hams hanging in smokehouses a century ago generally came from slower-growing animals that carried considerably more fat. That fat was not merely stored energy. It contributed flavor, aroma, texture, moisture retention, oxidative chemistry during aging, and ultimately the eating quality of the finished ham.Traditional curing evolved around those animals.Modern industrial curing evolved around very different ones.In other words, long before a pig ever encounters salt, smoke, nitrate, nitrite, or a smokehouse, the product had already begun to change. That observation raises yet another question that nutrition science has rarely addressed.When researchers compare “processed meats” across decades, are they even studying the same animal?Good science begins by asking good questions. This series is an attempt to ask some that are rarely discussed. If you enjoy long-form essays that combine history, agriculture, food science, and public health, I hope you'll join us.Subscribe nowPlease consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to Malone News. Your support allows us to continue researching and publishing work that doesn't fit into a headline or a soundbite.The Great Scientific Blind SpotBy now, it should be obvious that “processed meat” is not a single food.It is not even a single method of preservation.It is an extraordinarily broad category encompassing foods preserved by entirely different technologies, produced from genetically different animals, and manufactured using methods that range from centuries-old craftsmanship to highly automated industrial production.At one end of the spectrum are traditional whole-muscle cured meats, products transformed slowly through salt, air, smoke, fermentation, and time. At the other end are highly formulated industrial products, injected with curing solutions, mechanically tenderized, emulsified, stabilized, cooked, packaged, and distributed through national supply chains. Between those two extremes lies an enormous diversity of foods that differ in their ingredients, chemistry, moisture content, microbial ecology, fat composition, and manufacturing processes.But the story is even more complicated than that.As discussed above, over the past seventy-five years, the pig itself has changed. Breeding programs selected for faster growth, leaner carcasses, improved feed conversion, and greater uniformity. At the same time, curing methods changed. Refrigeration changed. Distribution changed. Consumer expectations changed. Meat science changed. Even the economics of producing ham changed.In other words, the exposure itself has not remained constant.When epidemiologists analyze “processed meat,” they are not studying a single food. They are studying an evolving category that has changed continuously over time. A Virginia country ham hanging in a smokehouse in 1930, a Prosciutto di Parma produced under centuries-old Italian traditions, a supermarket deli ham injected with curing solution, and a modern hot dog manufactured from emulsified meat and injected with GRAS ingredients may all appear under the same heading in a food-frequency questionnaire.From the standpoint of food chemistry, meat science, and biology, these are profoundly different products.That does not mean the epidemiology is wrong. It does mean we should be cautious about assuming that one hazard ratio applies equally to every food placed into this remarkably broad category. Science advances by making careful distinctions, not by overlooking them.That brings us to the central question of this series.If “processed meat” is not one food, not one preservation method, and not even one type of pig, what exactly are the epidemiologic studies measuring? More importantly, which aspects of modern meat processing, if any, are actually responsible for the reported health risks?Those are the questions we will tackle in Part Three, where we leave the smokehouse behind and enter the world of nutritional epidemiology, relative risk, absolute risk, and the evidence that has shaped public health recommendations around the world.JGMIf you think this is a discussion worth having, please share this article. The more people who understand how our food changed, the better the conversation about where it should go next.Share

Summary: Why America chose nitrite


Friday Funnies: Brain Freeze

Bizarrely, I used the above meme two years ago when we all thought the turtle was brain dead - after freezing in the middle of a speech for almost a minute - turns out Mitch wasn’t quite dead then either.Jeez..Time to retire already!Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public, so please share it!ShareMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.JGM

Summary: and other true stories


Friday Funnies: God Bless the USA

I work the front desk at a small doctor’s office, and I wish people could see what happens on the other side of the phone.Every day, older patients call us confused.They are told to use the patient portal, upload documents, check lab results online, fill out forms before the visit, and confirm everything through a link.Some of them do not know what a portal is.Some do not have a smartphone.Some have one, but they are afraid to click the wrong thing.Last week, a man in his late 80s called about his test results.He said, “Ma’am, I don’t mean to bother you, but the computer says I have a message and I don’t know how to open it.”He sounded ashamed.That broke my heart.He should not have to feel ashamed for needing a human being.Technology can be helpful. I understand that.But when people who built this country are made to feel helpless because everything became a login and a password, we have gone too far.Not everything needs to be an app.Not every answer should be hidden behind a screen.~UnknownCaption this:And to be clear, when Joe Rogan hostedFear Factor, eating live insects was considered disgusting television. Amazing how quickly some ideas get rebranded.But seriously, remember when eating insects was the punchline to a reality show challenge? Then somewhere along the way, it became a serious proposal. The global elite assured us that crickets were the future, climate change demanded dietary sacrifice, and progressive activists enthusiastically explained that our reluctance was merely cultural conditioning.Curiously, the people delivering the lectures never seemed to be replacing their filet mignon with mealworms. These days, the great insect revolution appears to have quietly fluttered off into the sunset, joining the long list of fashionable ideas that generated plenty of headlines, conferences, gullible investors, and PowerPoint presentations, but remarkably little public appetite.ShareMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.We are in the midst of a heatwave here - temps in the 100s all week.So staying cool, taking care of the animals, hanging with friends and doing farm chores carefully is the order of the day(s).Have a great 4th folks!JGM


The Amendment That Changed America

A companion essay to “The Quiet Death of American Federalism.” July 2026.The Amendment That Changed AmericaHow the Sixteenth Amendment Broke the ConstitutionAudio Version:The Story in Brief: The Missing Half of FederalismA companion essayto this one, published earlier this week, showed how the founders restrained government by dividing power, and how those restraints were dismantled between 1868 and 1913.This essay expounds on one thread from that: The story of money and taxation.The founders expected each state to raise its own taxes. They also understood that a state that taxed too aggressively would lose people, businesses, and investment to its neighbors. Competition among the states was not a flaw in the system. It was one of its safeguards.That principle runs through the American founding. Adam Smith explained it inThe Wealth of Nations, published the same year as the Declaration of Independence. Brutus saw where it led and warned what would happen if the federal government ever gained the upper hand. Economists spent the twentieth century proving what Smith had observed and Brutus had predicted.The Constitution gave both the states and the federal government the power to tax within a single national market where Americans, their businesses, and their capital could move freely. Then came 1913. The Seventeenth Amendment stripped the states of their direct voice in the Senate. The Sixteenth Amendment gave Washington an unlimited claim on Americans’ incomes. The political half of American federalism and the financial half were dismantled in the same year.This is the story of the money half. It is also the story of one forgotten Anti-Federalist who predicted almost exactly how it would end.Federalists vs. Anti-Federalists in Plain EnglishThe Federalistswanted a stronger national government. They believed the Articles of Confederation had left Congress too weak to govern effectively.The Anti-Federalistsagreed the Articles had problems but worried about something else: that a stronger federal government, once created, would never stop growing. They argued that Washington would eventually drain power, money, and authority away from the states.The Constitution was largely the Federalists’ victory. The last two centuries have been, in many ways, a test of the Anti-Federalists’ prediction.The idea itself was hardly revolutionary in 1776. Adam Smith observed that land cannot move, so governments can tax it almost at will. Money is different. The owner of capital, he wrote, is “properly a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country.” Tax him too heavily and “he would remove his stock to some other country” where he could conduct his business in peace.That is the entire principle in two sentences. Governments tax what cannot escape. They bargain with what can.The founders did not invent that insight. They built a constitutional system that put it to work. Fifty states competing for citizens and businesses would discipline one another in ways no law or politician ever could.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareThe Citizen of the WorldThe principle is simple. What limits a tax is not the wording of the law. It is whether the thing being taxed can leave.Land cannot move. Buildings cannot move. Governments can tax them almost at will.People can move. Businesses can move. Investment can move even faster. Tax them too heavily, and they begin looking for the exit.That possibility alone disciplines government. Every business owner understands the principle. Raise prices too much and customers walk across the street. Governments are no different. Raise taxes too much, and taxpayers walk across a state line.What the Founders BuiltThe founders built a system that put this principle to work.First, the states kept their own power to tax. The Constitution gave the new federal government a taxing power, but it did not take that authority away from the states. As Hamilton explained inFederalist No. 32, taxation remained “a concurrent and coequal authority” shared by both governments. The states retained that authority “in the most absolute and unqualified sense.”Think of it this way. Two tax collectors stood beside the same taxpayer. Both reached into the same wallet. Neither could ignore what the other was doing.One point is often misunderstood. The founders did not want Washington living on money handed up by the states. They had already tried that under the Articles of Confederation, the nation's first constitution, which took effect in 1781. Congress had no independent power to tax. It passed the hat, and the states decided whether to contribute. Too often they did not. The result was a national government that was chronically broke, unable to pay its debts, and too weak to carry out many of its basic responsibilities. Fixing that failure was one of the principal reasons delegates met in Philadelphia in 1787. They were sent to amend the Articles, but they ended up writing an entirely new Constitution.The solution was not dependence. It was competition. Each government would raise its own revenue from the same citizens, forcing both to remain accountable to the same taxpayers.Second, the founders tied Washington’s hands on the most dangerous tax of all. The Constitution required any “direct” tax to be apportioned among the states by population, a rule so cumbersome that a national income or wealth tax was practically impossible. For more than a century, the federal government lived mostly on tariffs and excise taxes on goods such as whiskey.The one tax that could grow almost without limit, a direct claim on what Americans earned, was deliberately kept out of Washington’s reach. That constitutional ceiling held until 1913.Finally, the founders made sure Americans could vote with their feet. Citizens and businesses were free to cross state lines, taking their property, investments, and livelihoods with them. A tax you cannot escape disciplines no one. A tax you can escape by moving to the next state disciplines every legislature - each state was in competition with the other states, to keep businesses in their state by maintaining a low tax rate.Whether the founders fully appreciated the economic consequences is impossible to know. But they built a constitutional system in which governments competed for citizens instead of citizens competing for the favor of government.Brutus Saw Where It LedThe clearest warning came from the men who lost the fight over the Constitution.Writing under the nameBrutus, most likely New York judge Robert Yates, one Anti-Federalist focused on a danger almost everyone else overlooked: the federal power to tax. Once Washington could tax “in all its parts,” he warned, the states would “find it impossible to raise monies to support their governments.” Deprived of revenue, their powers would eventually be “absorbed in that of the general government.”His point was simple. Governments without money are governments without power. If Washington collected most of the revenue, the states would eventually become dependent on Washington to survive.Brutus matters not because he opposed the Constitution. He matters because he described the system exactly as it was built, then predicted how it would fail.Two governments would reach into the same taxpayer’s wallet. One of them would eventually win.Hamilton never really disputed the danger. InFederalist No. 31, he openly acknowledged that an unlimited federal taxing power “might, and probably would in time,” strip the states of the resources needed to govern themselves and leave them “entirely at the mercy of the national legislature.”Hamilton did not dispute the danger. He disputed the outcome. He believed Congress would answer to the same voters as the states, and Americans would remain loyal enough to their state governments that Washington would never push matters that far. It was a political solution rather than a structural one.  In effect, he bet that political restraint would succeed where constitutional restraint did not.Brutus was not convinced. He believed power would follow the money, regardless of anyone's intentions.Brutus made the opposite bet. Everything after 1913 is simply evidence that Brutus was right. I think that's the line readers should remember.One hundred and twenty-five years later, history declared a winner (hint: and it wasn’t the people).The Founders Built It. Economists Explained It.They gave the states their own taxing power. They created a single national market where Americans, businesses, and investment could move freely. What they did not do was sit down and write a formal theory explaining why that arrangement would restrain government. Later generations would do that for them.Adam Smith supplied the first piece in 1776. InThe Wealth of Nations, he observed that governments can easily tax what cannot move. They have far less power over people, businesses, and capital that can simply leave. He called the owner of capital "a citizen of the world" because money has no permanent home. It flows toward places where it is treated well and away from places where it is punished.Capital can move. Governments that tax it too aggressively lose it. More than a century later, the economist Friedrich Hayek explained why the principle worked inside a federal system. Where people, businesses, and money are free to move, no state can tax too heavily or regulate too aggressively without paying a price. Its taxpayers simply leave.Ludwig von Mises carried the idea even further. The freedom to walk away, he argued, is one of the strongest checks on government ever devised. It is difficult to abuse people who always have another place to go.Then came Murray Rothbard. He tied the economics back to the Constitution.Government, he argued, is a monopoly on force, and taxation is its principal means of exercising that force. Like any monopoly, it expands until something stops it. The strongest restraint is competition. If citizens and their money can leave, government has to behave.In his historyConceived in Liberty, Rothbard also reached a conclusion that would have pleased Brutus. The Anti-Federalists, he argued, had correctly foreseen the long-term danger of an expanding national government.The economists who followed simply put equations around the same idea. James Buchanan and Geoffrey Brennan described governments as institutions that naturally seek more revenue unless checked by competition. Charles Tiebout showed how people “vote with their feet,” choosing communities based on taxes and services. Barry Weingast called the arrangement “market-preserving federalism,” a system in which governments compete instead of simply extracting wealth from captive taxpayers.None of these economists invented the principle. Smith conceived of what was to come. The founders built it. Brutus warned what would happen if it failed. The economists simply explained why the system worked, and why dismantling it changed the balance of power in America.Share1913: The Year the Balance BrokeIn the end, every government is limited by one thing: how much money it can collect.For more than a century, Washington lived under two financial restraints. The Constitution made a federal income tax so difficult that it was practically impossible, and tariffs could only be pushed so far before they became politically and economically self-defeating.Then, in 1913, Congress and the states ratified the Sixteenth Amendment.The Sixteenth Amendment (1913)‘The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”Twenty-seven words fundamentally changed American federalism.Before 1913, the Constitution required any direct tax to be apportioned among the states according to population. That made a national income tax so cumbersome that it could never become the federal government’s principal source of revenue.The Sixteenth Amendment swept away that obstacle. Washington could now tax income directly, from whatever source it came. As the economy grew, so did the federal government’s revenue. The amendment did far more than authorize an income tax. It opened the largest and fastest-growing tax base in the country to the federal government and permanently shifted the financial balance between Washington and the states.The founders had deliberately kept that power out of Washington’s hands. With a single constitutional amendment, that restraint disappeared.The Sixteenth Amendment is usually taught as a tax story. The Seventeenth Amendment is usually taught as an election story.They are really the same story.One gave Washington the money.The other took the states’ seats away from the table.One removed the financial restraint on federal power.The other weakened one of the Constitution’s principal political restraints.Together, they changed the balance the founders had built.What followed looked remarkably like Brutus’s prediction.Federal revenues eventually dwarfed those of the states, and money became the lever by which Washington expanded its authority. It rarely needed to command the states. It simply offered money, attached conditions to it, and waited. States that depended on federal dollars gradually found themselves carrying out federal priorities instead of their own.Hamilton expected the states and the federal government to compete as equal taxing partners, each collecting its own revenue and neither dependent on the other. By the twentieth century, that relationship had largely been turned on its head. Instead of competing with Washington, the states increasingly administered programs that Washington designed, funded, and often dictated.Brutus had predicted that two governments drawing from the same taxpayers could not remain equals forever. One would eventually dominate the other.He was wrong about only one thing.It did not happen immediately.It took one hundred and twenty-five years.Switzerland: The System That SurvivedIf America wants to see what this system looks like today, it need only look at Switzerland.The Swiss never abandoned the financial half of federalism. Their cantons still collect most taxes, and they compete openly for residents, businesses, and investment. A canton that taxes too heavily or regulates too aggressively risks watching taxpayers move to the next canton.Adam Smith would have recognized the system immediately. His “citizen of the world” is alive and well in Switzerland. Competition still disciplines government because governments know taxpayers have real choices. It is the same competitive pressure Hamilton described, the same force Brutus feared Washington would eventually destroy, and the same constitutional balance America began dismantling in 1913.That does not mean every Swiss canton is left to fend for itself. Wealthier cantons, together with the federal government, help support poorer ones through a system of fiscal equalization. But the goal is not to make every canton financially dependent on Bern. It is to ensure that every canton can remain self-governing while preserving competition among them.That is the crucial difference.Switzerland uses cooperation to preserve federalism. America increasingly used federal money to weaken it.The founders wanted states that could stand on their own feet, compete for citizens and businesses, and answer primarily to their own taxpayers. Switzerland largely kept that model. America gradually replaced it with one in which states became increasingly dependent on programs designed, funded, and often directed from Washington.Brutus Was RightThe companion essayended with politics. America steadily removed the institutions that could check Washington, while Switzerland added more and locked them into place. This essay tells the same story through money.The founders created two sovereign taxing authorities operating within a single national market. Citizens, businesses, and capital were free to move, forcing both state and federal governments to compete for the same taxpayers. Adam Smith explained why that competition would restrain government. Brutus warned that if Washington ever gained the financial upper hand, the states would slowly lose both their revenue and their independence. Hamilton believed political restraint and Americans’ loyalty to their states would prevent it.In 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment removed the founders’ financial restraint on federal power. In the same year, the Seventeenth Amendment weakened one of the principal political restraints. Together, they altered the balance that the founders had carefully constructed. Washington gained both the money and, over time, the leverage that money inevitably brings.What followed was not inevitable because it was planned. It was inevitable because incentives changed. Money flowed to Washington. Power followed the money.That does not mean the story is over. The states still possess broad taxing authority. They can still compete for citizens, businesses, and investment. They can still resist becoming mere administrators of federal programs. Federalism is not dead. It has been weakened, and what has been weakened can be strengthened.The first step is simply to recognize what was lost.In 1787, a New York judge named Robert Yates, who wrote under the alias “Brutus,” saw it coming. His prediction took 125 years to come true.It arrived, fittingly enough, as a constitutional amendment.End.RWM / JGMMALONE.NEWSOur goal is simple: to ask the questions that rarely get asked and to follow the evidence wherever it leads. If you find value in that approach, please become a free or paid subscriber and help us continue the work.A Supporting BibliographyFounding-era sourcesSmith, Adam.An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776. Book V, Chapter II. The owner of capital as a “citizen of the world” who moves his money away from a heavy tax. The idea at the center of this essay, stated the year of the Declaration.Hamilton, Alexander.The Federalist, Numbers 31 and 32. 1788. The founders’ own account of the taxing power the states kept, and Hamilton’s admission that an unlimited federal tax might in time leave the states unable to fund themselves.Brutus [Robert Yates, attributed]. Essays I and VI. 1787. The Anti-Federalist warning that the federal taxing power would leave the states broke and absorb them into the national government. The prediction at the center of this essay.United States Constitution. Article I, on the shared taxing power and the rule for direct taxes, and Article IV, on the right of citizens to move freely among the states. The structure the founders built: two taxing powers, a deliberately hobbled federal income tax, and a mobile people.Theory and historyHayek, F. A. “The Economic Conditions of Interstate Federalism.” 1939. Free movement of goods, money, and people within a country sharply limits how heavily any one government can tax. The modern version of Smith’s point.Mises, Ludwig von.Liberalism. 1927. The freedom to leave, down to the smallest community, as one of the deepest checks on government.Rothbard, Murray N.Power and Market: Government and the Economy. 1970. Government as a monopoly on force whose main business is taxation, held in check only by competition and by people’s freedom to leave.Rothbard, Murray N.Conceived in Liberty. Arlington House, 1975. Treats the Anti-Federalists as the ones who got it right, and Brutus as the most accurate forecaster in the whole debate.Brennan, Geoffrey, and James M. Buchanan.The Power to Tax: Analytical Foundations of a Fiscal Constitution. Cambridge University Press, 1980. Government pictured as a revenue-grabbing machine, held back mainly by competition among jurisdictions.Tiebout, Charles M. “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures.”Journal of Political Economy, 1956. People sorting themselves among places by the mix of taxes and services each offers. Voting with your feet, written as math.Weingast, Barry R. “The Economic Role of Political Institutions: Market-Preserving Federalism and Economic Development.”Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 1995. Federalism as a competitive order that keeps a government from preying on its own economy.Somin, Ilya.Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. Oxford University Press, 2020. The present-day case for the freedom to move as a check on government, and the direct heir of Smith’s citizen of the world.


Sunday Strip: Never Say Never

Still waiting…I am pinning my hopes on Vance at this point.Only in Europe…ShareMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Last night, we skipped Washington, D.C. (Thank God), and instead spent the evening at a wonderful Fourth of July party hosted by friends, complete with fireworks over Lake Gordonsville, Virginia.Somehow, this photo says it all. Robert, holding their elderly long-coated Chihuahua with a slice of watermelon in hand, surrounded by the simple symbols of the American spirit, captured the evening perfectly.JGM

Summary: An


A Founders' Fourth of July Party

So it’s finally here: the big kahuna, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Fireworks are a given. The cookout is mandatory. But if you’re looking to celebrate like the Founders themselves, what would be on the menu?Probably not hamburgers or hot dogs. Think roast beef or smoked ham, oysters if you lived near the coast, roast chicken, fresh summer vegetables, corn, beans, biscuits, cheeses, pickles, berry pies, and whatever had just come out of the orchard or garden.And in the glass? Not light beer or hard seltzer, but hard cider, applejack, rum punch, and perhaps a bowl of Cherry Bounce sitting on the sideboard. In other words, a celebration that looked a lot more like a harvest feast than a backyard barbecue.Can we talk booze?The Fourth of July tends to bring out red, white, and blue cocktails involving vodka, blue curaçao, and enough sugar to power a small city. They are festive. They are colorful. They are also completely foreign to the men who signed the Declaration of Independence.Colonial Americans drank what they grew, what they distilled, and what survived the trip across the Atlantic. Hard cider was often safer than water. Rum arrived by the barrel. Applejack was America’s native spirit.Punch bowls were the centerpiece of political gatherings, military celebrations, and long evenings spent solving the world’s problems.If you want to toast America’s 250th in something the Founders would actually recognize, start here.Share1. Stone FenceIf America had an unofficial national cocktail before bourbon, this was probably it. A Stone Fence is simply hard cider fortified with rum or applejack. It is uncomplicated, sturdy, and entirely appropriate for a country built by farmers who had chores waiting the next morning.Ingredients2 ounces dark rum (or applejack)5–6 ounces dry hard ciderFreshly grated nutmegPour the rum into a mug, top with chilled hard cider, and grate fresh nutmeg over the top.2. Fish House PunchColonial America took its punch seriously. Fish House Punch originated near Philadelphia decades before the Revolution, and became famous for two characteristics: it tasted wonderfully refreshing and had an unfortunate tendency to convince respectable gentlemen they were considerably smarter than they actually were.Ingredients1½ ounces Jamaican rum¾ ounce Cognac or brandy½ ounce applejack1¼ ounces lemon shrub (or fresh lemon juice with simple syrup).Shake with ice and strain into a chilled glass.One serving is delightful. Four servings have altered the course of many political conversations.(What the heck is shrub? The history of shrub and a recipe can be found at the end of this Substack.)3. Colonial Applejack ToddyApplejack is one of America’s oldest distilled spirits, produced by concentrating hard cider during the winter. A warm toddy made with applejack is about as close to colonial comfort food as one can pour into a mug.Ingredients2 ounces applejackHot water1 teaspoon honey or maple syrupLemon sliceFresh nutmegCombine everything in a mug and stir gently.Best enjoyed after fireworks, preferably while arguing about whether Jefferson or Adams was the better writer.***Buy:Laird's Applejack or, even better, Laird's Straight Apple Brandy if your liquor store carries it. Either would have been immediately familiar to America's Founders, although today's versions are distilled rather than freeze-concentrated as many colonial farmers once made them.4. Cherry BounceGeorge Washington was fond of Cherry Bounce, a sweet cordial made by steeping cherries in brandy. Traditionally, it was prepared with fresh tart cherries and aged for several months, but unless you planned your Independence Day celebration sometime around Presidents’ Day, frozen tart cherries make an excellent substitute. In fact, they often release their juice more readily than fresh fruit.Ingredients2 pounds frozen tart cherries (thawed)1 cup sugar1 bottle good brandy1 cinnamon stick4 whole clovesSmall piece of nutmegCombine everything in a glass jar, seal tightly, and store in a cool, dark place for at least one month. Three months is better. Six months is ideal.If patience is not among your virtues, make enough now for Thanksgiving and pretend that was the plan all along.Didn't think about Cherry Bounce until the Fourth of July? You're in good company.Mix equal parts unsweetened tart cherry juice and brandy, then sweeten to taste with simple syrup (or sugar, stirred until dissolved). Add a cinnamon stick and a little freshly grated nutmeg, chill well, and serve over ice. It won't be a true-aged Cherry Bounce, but it captures the spirit of the original without waiting until Thanksgiving.5. Wassail Hard CiderLong before craft breweries discovered cinnamon sticks, colonial families were warming cider with spices around hearth fires. This is less a cocktail than an invitation to sit down, stay awhile, and have another conversation.Ingredients1 quart dry hard cider2 cinnamon sticks6 whole cloves1 sliced orange1 sliced appleOptional splash of apple brandyWarm gently without boiling for about twenty minutes.Serve in mugs.For Those Skipping the SpiritsNot everyone wants alcohol, and colonial America had plenty of alternatives that deserve a place on the table.Switchel (Haymakers Punch)Before sports drinks came in fluorescent colors and mysterious ingredients, there was switchel. Farmers drank it while working hay fields because it was refreshing and inexpensive.Ingredients2 cups cold water2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar1 tablespoon molasses or honey1 teaspoon grated fresh gingerStir until dissolved and serve over ice.Think of it as the original electrolyte drink, developed before marketing departments discovered neon dyes.Ginger Lemon ShrubShrubs were one of colonial America’s favorite ways to preserve fruit and make refreshing drinks. Mixed simply with sparkling water, they are bright, crisp, and remarkably modern-tasting despite being more than two centuries old.Ingredients2 ounces lemon shrub (or equal parts lemon juice and simple syrup with a splash of apple cider vinegar)Sparkling waterFresh lemon slicePour over ice and top with sparkling water.It looks sophisticated, tastes wonderful, and lets you stay awake long enough to watch and listen to everyone else tell the same Revolutionary War stories for the third time.There is something fitting about raising a glass filled with apples, rum, ginger, or brandy on the nation’s 250th birthday. These weren’t novelty drinks invented for social media. They were the beverages that accompanied harvests, debates, celebrations, victories, defeats, and the remarkable experiment that became the United States.Here’s to another 250 years. Cheers.If you enjoyed this trip back to America's original happy hour, please consider subscribing. Every subscription helps keep the history, the research, even the recipes, and the occasional good-natured poke at modern life coming your way. Share this article with a friend, raise a glass to the Founders, and consider celebrating the 250th the traditional way.A Brief History of ShrubLong before refrigeration, people had to become remarkably creative about preserving fruit. One solution was the shrub, a concentrated syrup made by combining fruit, sugar, and vinegar. The sugar drew out the juices, while the vinegar acted as a natural preservative, allowing the flavors of summer to last well beyond harvest.Mixed with cool water, sparkling water, or spirits, shrubs became one of the most popular beverages in Britain and the American colonies. Colonial households made them from lemons, raspberries, cherries, peaches, currants, and just about anything growing in the garden or orchard. Every family had its own recipe, and every good hostess was expected to have a bottle or two waiting in the pantry.The name “shrub” comes from the Arabic wordsharāb, meaning “to drink,” the same linguistic root that eventually gave ussherbetandsyrup. The Founding Fathers would have known shrubs well, both as refreshing summer drinks and as the foundation for many of the punches served at dinners and political gatherings. Today, they’re making a well-deserved comeback, though they’re often marketed as an expensive craft cocktail ingredient. But to our colonial ansestors, shrub was simply a practical way to preserve fruit, avoid waste, and make plain water a little more interesting.Simple Colonial Lemon ShrubPeel and juice 4 lemons.Combine the peels with 1 cup sugar. Let sit overnight until the sugar draws out the citrus oils.Stir in 1 cup fresh lemon juice.Add ½ to ¾ cup apple cider vinegar (to taste).Refrigerate for two daysStrain and bottle.Keeps for weeks in the refrigerator.To serve:1–2 ounces shrubSparkling waterIceOr substitute the sparkling water with rum, brandy, or applejack for an authentic colonial cocktail.Note: Shrub can be bought at specialty shops.Quick Colonial Lemon ShrubThis isn’t the weeks-old pantry shrub a colonial housewife would have kept on the shelf, but it makes a wonderfully refreshing stand-in.Ingredients1 cup fresh lemon juice (about 4–6 lemons)1 cup simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water, heated just until the sugar dissolves and then cooled)¼ cup apple cider vinegarCombine the lemon juice, simple syrup, and apple cider vinegar in a pitcher or jar and stir well. Refrigerate until chilled.To ServeNon-alcoholic:Pour 2–3 ounces over ice and top with sparkling water.Colonial cocktail:Combine 2 ounces of shrub with 2 ounces of dark rum or applejack and top with sparkling water, or use it as the citrus component in Fish House Punch.The vinegar should add just enough brightness that people wonder what makes it taste so refreshing without immediately realizing what the secret ingredient is.JGM

Summary: Five Drinks the Founding Fathers Would Actually Recognize


YOU ARE NOT RAW MATERIAL FOR PROFIT

Here is something simple enough that a child understands it, and important enough that grown-ups keep forgetting it: you belong to yourself.Your body is yours. Your mind is yours. The tiny instructions inside your cells that make you you are yours. What you believe, what you decide, and what you allow to be done to you are yours to choose.For most of history, that was safe, because no one else could reach those things. No one could open your thoughts and read them. No one could rewrite the code inside your cells. No one could switch off your ability to buy food or see a doctor with the press of a button.That is no longer true.We have built machines that can read the brain, change the brain, and record what it does. We can edit the genes a person passes to their children. We can take a drop of someone’s blood and patent what we find in it. We can make a whole life, the money, the job, the medicine, the freedom to travel, depend on a digital ID that someone else controls and can turn off.None of this is science fiction. It exists right now.Used with your permission, these tools can heal people. Someone who cannot walk might walk again. A disease that has haunted a family for generations might finally end. That is good, and we are for it.The danger is not the tools. The danger is one word: forced. The danger is the day someone decides what will be done to your body, your mind, or your children’s genes, and does it whether you agree or not.  Forced or coerced, it is all the same.So we wrote down a new line in the sand that shall not be crossed. Plainly. In words anyone can read. It says these things are yours, and no one may cross into them without your free and honest yes. You can always say no. No one can be owned. No one can be treated as a thing.We call it the Declaration of the Rights of Persons.Not the rights of citizens, not the rights of the healthy, not the rights of the useful. The rights of persons, which means everyone, with no small print.We need your name on it. Not because a signature is magic, but because rights that no one stands up for are rights that quietly disappear. The people who would cross these lines are counting on you not to notice and not to bother. Prove them wrong.In the older language of 1776, from which this effort takes its name and its spirit, the same claim reads this way:When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for the people to state the inviolable and sui generis nature of the individual person, to confirm that nature among the powers of the earth and the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle the individual person, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all humans are created equal and as individuals, that each is endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, private property, ownership and control of their individual personhood, and the pursuit of happiness.Two and a half centuries ago, the founders could name the tyrannies of their age: a distant king, a standing army, a tax without a vote. Ours are quieter, and they arrive in a lab coat and a user agreement. But the claim underneath is unchanged. The person comes first, and no power may reach past the line that makes a person their own.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareWhy a new declaration, when we already have great onesWe are not replacing anything. We honor the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. This new Declaration stands on the shoulders of those documents. It is written in their spirit, and it is meant to extend their protection, not to compete with it.But here is the plain fact about every one of those documents. Each was written before the technologies that now threaten us. The founders of 1776 could not have imagined gene editing. The authors of the 1948 Declaration could not have imagined a brain-computer implant, a nationwide biometric ID, or a corporation holding a patent on a stretch of human DNA.Those documents protected people against the threats of their own time, and they did it well: against kings and standing armies, against searches without warrant, against censorship, against being jailed without trial. What they could not do was defend against dangers no one alive had yet seen. That is not a flaw. It is the nature of time. You cannot build a fence against an animal that has not yet been born.  But now, we confront a new beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.The gaps left behind are exactly where the new dangers live. The Declaration of the Rights of Persons is built to fill them.It protects your body and your medical choices, and it says plainly that consent given only because refusing would cost you your job, your education, or your bank account is not real consent. It protects your mind, both your right to keep your thoughts private and your right not to have your brain altered without permission. It protects your genome and your biological material from being taken, patented, or sold without your say. It protects your data and your digital identity, so that no system can be used to erase you or lock you out of ordinary life. And it says these protections follow you everywhere, including into the places where old law runs thin: the internet, the open sea, and even outer space.The one word that holds it all togetherThe whole Declaration turns on a single word: person.History’s worst crimes almost always began the same way. The powerful did not usually start by calling a group of people non-human. They started by defining "human" narrowly enough that some people fell outside it, or by treating people as property. Once you are outside the word, or once you are property, everything can be taken from you.So the Declaration anchors its protections in the person, a standing that cannot be graded, split, or revoked. It does not matter what you look like, what you believe, how much you own, what papers you carry, or whether you have accepted or refused some new medical or genetic technology. You are a person, fully and equally, and that cannot be taken away.That last point matters more each year. As machines and biology advance, there will be pressure to sort people into new classes: the upgraded and the ordinary, the verified and the unverified, the enhanced and the merely human. The Declaration forbids this. The line it draws is between the freedom to choose and forced compulsion.What this is, and what it is notThis is a non-partisan initiative, and we mean that seriously.The rights in this Declaration do not belong to a party, because they belong to persons. They protect the privacy-minded reader on the left and the medical-freedom parent on the right in exactly equal measure. They protect the religious and the secular, the farmer and the coder, the modified and the unmodified. A right that takes a side is not a right. It is a weapon.A word about who we are. The people who began this work were part of the grassroots movement to make America healthy again in the years before the last election, a movement rooted in concern for health freedom, informed consent, and bodily autonomy. We are proud of that work.But this initiative is independent of that. We are not the trademarked corporate organization that now carries that name, nor are we the federal government’s program by that name. We are private citizens who have spent months quietly building this on our own for everyone, without regard to party.We took the name of the site, the Spirit of 1776, because the spirit of 1776 was never the property of any party. It was the claim that people are born with rights no power may touch, and that just government rests on the consent of the governed. That is the whole of what we are doing here, carried to a new frontier.What we intend to do with your signatureA signature is a beginning, not an end.The Declaration is the standard. The work is to write that standard into law, and we intend to pursue it at every level:Local.Model resolutions and ordinances that protect consent, bodily autonomy, and data rights in towns, counties, and communities, where change often begins.State.Legislation on genetic privacy, neural and biometric data, medical consent free of economic coercion, and protection against digital-identity systems that can lock a person out of ordinary life.National.Statutory protections, and in time constitutional recognition, that name the rights of the person across the body, the mind, the genome, and the digital world.International.Treaty language that carries these protections into the domains no single nation governs, the digital sphere, the high seas, and outer space, and that names the natural person explicitly, before those frontiers are settled by someone else on other terms.Lawmakers move when they see a constituency. Numbers are how a shared conviction becomes a political fact. Every name on this Declaration is a brick, and enough bricks become a wall that the powerful cannot quietly step over.The public launchWe began by inviting a founding generation of signatories: physicians and scientists, clergy and people of faith, farmers and stewards of the land, parents and educators, and citizens of conscience. These first signers will be recognized as the founders of this effort.Today, on Independence Day, we open the Declaration to everyone. This is where you come in.On our website is a simple observation: “The enclosure is assembled quietly, component by component.”Freedom is rarely lost in a single dramatic act of tyranny. It is surrendered piece by piece, each new step presented as convenience, efficiency, or safety in exchange for a little more of yourself. By the time most people recognize the pattern, the structure is already in place.You can see it now. And you can answer it with something as simple and as enduring as a name on a page.Read the Declaration. If it speaks for what you believe, sign it. Then share it with your family, your friends, and your neighbors. Rights are not preserved by the few who write them. They endure because the many refuse to surrender them.Read and sign the Declaration of the Rights of Persons atthespiritof1776.net.To the defense of these rights, for ourselves and for one another, and for every person who cannot yet defend them, we pledge our names, our efforts, and our sacred honor.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Summary: A Declaration of the Rights of Persons for an age that can read the mind, edit the genome, and switch off your access to daily life. Read it. Sign it. Pass it on.