What You Don’t Know Really Can’t Hurt You, But Coercion Can.

Seven percent of American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, according to a survey conducted earlier this year by the Innovation Center for US Dairy. That may sound horrifying, but ignorance about how food is produced is nothing new. On April Fool’s Day, 1957, the BBC broadcasted “a three-minute segment about a bumper spaghetti harvest in southern Switzerland,” as Hoaxes.org states. The “documentary” explained that the bumper crop was due to “an unusually mild winter and to the virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil.” The television audience “watched video footage of a Swiss family pulling pasta off spaghetti trees and placing it into baskets. The segment concluded with the assurance that, ‘For those who love this dish, there’s nothing like real, home-grown spaghetti.’”

The BBC didn’t immediately explain the hoax, and “hundreds of people phoned the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this query, the BBC diplomatically replied, ‘Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.’”

Few Americans live on farms anymore; many who live in urban areas have never gardened. Many of us use appliances and gadgets having no idea how they are constructed and work. Without the skills, knowledge, and efforts of others, most of us would quickly perish. Not one of us would enjoy our current standard of living. But one of the advantages of living in a modern society is that we don’t need to know how to construct the things we take for granted on a daily basis; we don’t even need to understand how they work.

In 2008, British artist Thomas Thwaites set out to make a toaster from scratch. After nine months of mining, smelting, and assembling raw materials, he succeeded in making a rudimentary but extremely expensive toaster. When he used it for the first time, the toaster melted.

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Learn Liberty | What you don’t know really can’t hurt you, but coercion can.