Mises rejected nutritional minimum standards as tools of despotic control

Evidence

Mises took this line of thought further in his major work Human Action, where he claimed that the very idea of a ‘physiological minimum of subsistence’ was an invention of ‘demagogues’. The claim that ‘a definite quantity of calories is needed to keep a man healthy and progenitive, and a further definite quantity to replace the energy expended in working’, was untenable, he argued. In the attempt to determine human needs, Mises saw an attempt to make humans the material of a despotic system of ‘breeding and feeding’ that deprived them of their margin of freedom. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 212

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that defining a calorie minimum is itself a form of tyranny inverts the usual humanitarian framing where nutrition standards are liberating. Dense and paradigm-shifting for readers working on market ethics.
• XREF: Connects to debates about the New Deal, food standards, and the historical politics of defining subsistence — echo of Foucault’s biopolitics and the idea that the state’s power over life depends on defining biological needs. — connects to: Opponents mocked federal food standards as sumptuary regulation by ignorant experts — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 1030
• SEED: Angle: ‘The anti-calorie right’ — a genealogy of how defining biological subsistence became politically suspect in the Austrian liberal tradition, and how the right to hunger got framed as a freedom.