Food Regulation or: You'd Think We Could All Agree On This

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Well apparently I thought wrong. There is great division in these here lands over the proper handling of food regulation (or lack thereof) by our glorious Big Brother government, who exist only to extract our hard-earned tax money from us at gunpoint. Who put these clowns in power, anyway? I certainly didn't. That would require having me come out of my bunker to go to the polls, and there are Black Panthers there ready to pounce on me! But I digress.

Now, we can't have a discussion without some baselines and clarifications, the first of which is the fallacy that libertarians want anarchy. They don't- they are perfectly accepting of a nice democratic republic with a nice Constitution. They simply don't like being told what they can and can't do, and would like these restrictions kept to an absolute minimum. Fraud, perjury, forgery, violence, or really any process that relies on force or lying should be illegal, and we all agree on that.

I have a personal issue with libertarians in that some (to not cast a generalized glance) advocate a society driven by a profit-motive, but a lot of things that act toward the benefit of society go against the profit motive. Testing your food, stickers with expiration dates, very rigorous safety measures, all of these cost money and yet in a society without safety laws, these people are expected to still follow these procedures that cost them a lot of money? This didn't happen in history, and I don't know why it would happen if all regulations were removed. That's my one gripe, and I'd like to not focus on it as much to just address the issues I'm about to bring up.



To that degree, we discuss under the premise that it should be illegal to lie to your consumers. How do you keep an industry from lying to its clients? That is one of my first questions. One way is through government regulation. Here is an anecdote about how Heinz became the market leader in ketchup:

By the start of the Twentieth Century, Heinz was a major ketchup producer, but so were several companies who padded their bottom line by mixing rancid tomatoes into their product.

Seeing an opportunity, Heinz joined the chorus of scientists, consumer advocates and government officials who were clamoring for federal oversight of the processed food industry, even sending future Heinz CEO Howard Heinz to lobby President Theodore Roosevelt in favor of a the Pure Food and Drug Act, which prohibited some of the processed food industry’s most revolting practices and gave enforcement authority to the agency which would later become the FDA. In 1906 the Act passed, and most of Heinz competitors were pushed out of business.

Because Heinz was one of only a handful of major ketchup producers who were already in the business of mass producing ketchup solely from fresh tomatoes, they quickly capitalized on the vacuum that formed as the rancid ketchup industry collapsed. Heinz became the market leader, and it remains so today.

Others would advocate merely that you provide government funding to test, and require safety labels on products that may contain harmful substances. Let the people decide after reading the labels whether or not they want the product, right?

My point is simply to indicate that, despite Heinz’ belief that “pure food . . . is good business,” the truth is that thousands of American consumers bought rancid ketchup for decades, even though they had the option to choose Heinz’ safer product. Market forces left thousands of Americans sick from tomato mold. It wasn’t until the federal government got involved that rotten tomato ketchup left the shelves of local groceries.

My argument is thus: History shows that people aren't quite the rational thinkers we'd like them to be. Even today, people make poor choices all the time and it costs them dearly. We have warning labels on cigarettes, but smoking is still very popular. We have warning labels on alcohol, but that hasn't stopped alcohol-related diseases or DUIs. My argument is that warning labels are not enough. To truly remove a harmful product from the shelf is to regulate against it. To set a limit of harmful content in a product that makes it illegal to sell above that amount.

Why should we allow this to be a risk? What benefit does tainted food serve being on a shelf? Even if you allow compensation to the person who ate the tainted food, if it's deadly then they're likely going to die before they get a dime. Liability is a non-factor to the consumer when dealing with deadly substances.

In the Heinz example, they started out by advertising the product as being pure while the others used rotten tomatoes, but people still continued buying rancid ketchup. Despite having all the information, market forces continued to favor the cheaper, tainted food. Using this historical evidence, my conclusion is that people can't make rational decisions even under the best circumstances. To really understand this topic you really have to look at the pure food movement in the 1900s and how hard it was to get people to not eat rancid food. To get them not to eat contaminated meat from butchers which was food colored to not look bad. To have food produced in the same place that rats defecated in. To have no laws against expiration dates. It was very difficult in that day, despite vast amounts of information available to the people, to get them to stop poisoning themselves without laws. It sounds crazy to just believe people will eat something that can kill them, knowing it can kill them, but I believe that it's a well-educated, white, wealthy viewpoint. They don't know what it's like to be poor, hungry, and uneducated. It's just a fact of life that abject poverty causes a lot of bad decision-making, and there's no way to stop the cycle without regulation that keeps poison off the shelves.

Secondly, I believe that it makes no sense to allow a company to produce something that can kill somebody. There is no reason for it to be on the shelf in the first place. How big is the label? Is it big enough or is it hidden with small text? How is it marketed? You run the risk of people being deceived. If there is merely a law to test the product, but none that makes it illegal to actually do it, then what can you do? If the warning label sufficiently covers the risk (assuming it hasn't been hampered in any way), what can someone do for compensation?

The Pure Food and Drug Act was initially concerned with ensuring products were labeled correctly. Later efforts were made to outlaw certain products that were not safe, followed by efforts to outlaw products which were safe but not effective.

Let's not confuse my analogy with alcohol and cigarettes as some sort of bizarre argument to outlaw those things. Both of them are okay in moderation, but it only takes one bad piece of food to get poisoned. That is the essential difference.

A regulatory system prevents tainted food from making it to stores. It prevents people from even having the option to consume. The whole point of market regulation is to mitigate externality, not allow a broader range of (very poor) choice to the consumer. This is the key point here of a regulatory system.

When you mitigate externality, you keep from incurring extra costs. You have to remember: Salmonella spreads, e.coli spreads. Just allowing them to produce tainted food runs the risk of it spreading to the rest of their products. For example, under current regulation if a farm is found to have tainted spinach then it is forced to get rid of all their spinach, and their entire process of making spinach has to be reevaluated. That's what regulation does.

A final note is that I am aware and acknowledge the imperfections in our system. There is corruption, there are regulatory agencies that promote bad food, there are inefficiencies and many other problems. I wish to improve this system, and I believe that it doesn't come from doing away with it entirely and returning to the age of robber barons and the most unsanitary food conditions our country has ever had.

Source: http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/libertarians-are-dumb-or-why-we-eat-heinz-ketchup/blog-298247/?page=2

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Food_and_Drug_Act

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Comments

[ironhawke.livejournal.com]

Well, lets start with the seatbelt:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt_legislation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt

The first legislation to mandate seat belts was in 1961, the first seat belt to be made standard in any car was in in 1958. So what you're asking me to believe is that the magical market would have put a seat belt in EVERY car, without legislation? Possible, I'll admit, but the time frame between the two incident makes it questionable for me. (Btw, yes, I don't care that people have to pay for seatbelts, I also don't care that they're required to use one. I was an EMT for 4 years, and on a fire department for 7. The associated costs both to the greater society's financial and mental health for NOT wearing seat belts greatly outweighs someone's right to be stupid.)

Anecdotal ketchup? Seriously? Point after point can be made to you to add evidence to these claims, yet because there isn't some overarching voice from God confirming it you can't believe that it's a problem?

if you're so smart to pick for them after all

Never have I said such a thing, however I do believe that regulation serves to prevent the stupidest of us from impacting the rest, or at least lowers the rates. While you might disagree with seat belts, the information proving that mandated use has reduced injury and death is undeniable. My stance isn't that I'm smarter, but that when you have enough evidence to prove that inaction is worse than regulation, I'll choose regulation. (Case in point, the drug war is absolutely ridiculous, pot and other "small fry" drugs should be legalized, because of the evidence that they have minimal effects on the population at large, while harder drugs should remain criminalized.)

Which makes drugs more costly and slower to market.

Would you prefer to buy your drugs from Mexico? Or Brazil? No? I'll take drugs that most likely aren't going to kill me.


I say we should all be given couches at work, only have to work 20 hours a week, and overtime should be paid at 6x the going rate.


Now you're just being silly. Taking a hyperbolic stance to make your point doesn't serve any use. Or "hyperbolic statement is hyperbolic."

I also don' get this insistence to think that every business and business owner is little more than a beady-eyed jackal waiting to drink the blood of babies. But our elected officials - they are saints!

Not at all, I am a true believer that the majority of businesses in America are at heart, good intentioned, corporate citizens who want to support the best and brightest in America. Just like I also believe that most of our elected officials are well intentioned. People are people, but regulation is intended to prevent the "beady-eyed jackals" from fucking things up for the rest of us.

[ironhawke.livejournal.com]

Well, I'll start here:

That's a fair, reasoned approach, I'll readily admit. I guess we simply disagree on the details and necessity.

I find this happening a lot on this comm. Maybe I should go take a page from Steve_Poticen(sp?) and go batshit loony on the left. None the less, I'll admit that as I age I become more libertarian-ish. Unfortunately I stand just a little too far on the "government can be good if well regulated" crowd.

You're also conflating correlation/causation. Vehicles are safer today largely because technology progresses. We have impact zones, etc. In fact, one of the top institutions in this field is the freaking insurance institute! People don't advertise that their cars meet government standards, people advertise that they get 5 stars on this, or an A rating from that.

I think this is the general problem with these arguments. Libertarians claim that such and such would have happened without regulation, while Dems/Repubs will argue that government intervention in (insert pet project) was necessary for the betterment of society. I do agree that market forces impact for the better certain things. (I.e. selling a safer, better, more durable product comes from a sort of proto-anarchy of supply/demand) HOWEVER!!!!1!eleventy!! When the final responsibility of corporations is to it's shareholders (who don't necessarily like the excuse of "Hey, we lost a few dollars a share this year because of XYZ social project, or XYZ environmental project) rather than the final responsibility of government is to it's people. (You can be cynical if you want about this, but as we saw in 2006/2008/2010 we saw a pretty hefty example of throwing out the bums.)

Plenty of people do, actually. In fact going to other countries for their lower-cost health care (Mexico and India) has become a sort of "thing".

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing IMO. I think that if enough people started doing this, eventually the American medical markets would start trying to drive prices down. Unfortunately I don't see this happening, so for now I'll trust the more expensive, more regulated American medical community.

(1) you think these things wouldn't come about naturally

I don't, at all. You have to remember the situations that precipitated the creation of these things. 80-100 hour work weeks, 10 years olds sacrificing their educations to work in coal mines, extremely unsafe working conditions, and employers that gladly would toss their entire workforce in the trash because they could easily find more cheap labor. (Don't try to tell me that w/o regulation there aren't enough desperate people who would take $4/hr right now to take such a job.) Again, as long as the people in charge were willing to exploit their workers, they continued to do so. I don't see that not being the case.


It's the same thing with pollution regulation. Disallowing >100ppm in your exhaust allows 100ppm in your exhaust. So we can have as many factories as long as they only spew 100ppm or below. And, in fact, you can spew that pollution out at little to no cost to you. Regulation, at least in the pollution field, often reduces the cost of pollution as much as it increases it.

I'm not entirely sure what you're getting here. You're making a point that we can have 100 factories spewing out 100ppm each (or 10,000ppm) or we can have one factory spewing out 10,000ppm and it's essentially the same result? If that IS what you're saying, that's very bizarre. It's a lot easier to have 1 factory spewing out 10,000ppm than it is to have 100 factories spewing 100ppm. Worse yet, you could have 100 factories putting out 10,000.....maybe I'm just misunderstanding you?

Either way, allowing 100ppm in your exhaust is yes, arbitrary, but we have to start somewhere. For better or for worse we do this with all of our laws. We start from some point that makes sense (or not, some would say) and we go from there.

[chessdev.livejournal.com]

WELL PUT. Excellent!!

[ironhawke.livejournal.com]

Why thankee sirah.

[ironhawke.livejournal.com]

The regulatory structure was put in place because the government considered the "common good" of the factories to outweigh a handful of individuals' property values (and health, but I digress).

That's an interesting point. I definitely see how regulation has come around as a result of protecting business practices, however I think we would disagree on that necessarily being the case now. Even if the FDA, EPA, etc are overly burdensome, the ultimate intent is to ensure that consumer safety is paramount, rather than business practices. (Yes, I'm sure a case could easily be made that lobbyists ensure that anti-competitive language is built into the very same laws, ensuring that the big Pharma companies maintain their hegemony...) Regardless, to use the same example, I'll have to stand by my original statement, that even if we're allowing 100ppm, we have to start somewhere. Pollution is a necessary byproduct of our current economy, and we simply have to put limits (in good faith) on how much damage a company can cause. (A La PG+E/Hinkley, California) The consequences, as you say of removing some civil recourse is unfortunate, but I'd rather take those particular cases of injustice against what I see as a over-arching environment of injustice were we to remove all/most regulations. Like most conversations with libertarians I've had, it comes down to opinions, because the argument is based on "faith" more than empirical fact or ability to show absolute cause.

Re: The minimum wage piece. I struggle on this note A: Because I simply don't know enough, in spite of my reading into it to make a personal assessment, and B: That my cynicism about employer abuses makes it difficult to believe that a removal of minimum wages wouldn't have a negative impact. I've had multiple long (and drunk) conversations with a good Econ friend of mine who argues against price floors, et al.

On the one hand, businesses constantly pass on their increased costs to their customers, so if for example, the rate of inflation increases and costs go up, then they raise their prices and move on. Unfortunately there is a reverse to this. An employee (lets say for the argument that he's a minimum wage employee) hired at $7.25/hr works for a company for 10 years will likely lose 10-20% of his earning capacity if he were paid the same over that 10 year period. He cannot "pass on" the increased costs of living, his only option is to work more hours or to get another job. Both perfectly reasonable in theory, but given the current economy a very poor likelihood. That being said, minimum wages ensure that American workers will at least maintain a minimum level of buying power year to year. Again though, there are other macro/micro economics that play into this re: unemployment etc. that I simply don't have enough information to judge on.

Lastly, good chat as well. I rarely agree with you but at least you've got the ability to reason your arguments out. Other libertarians on here...coughnonames...tend to resort to strawmen and attacks which essentially mandates that I ignore them out of pocket.

(p.s. Tell your friend I get his plight. I picked up a sales job where I was working 80 hours a week, making minimum wage for only 40 of them. I would have made more money if I'd done those 0.01 cent/per click jobs. The only caveat to this is your statement: And chances are if someone is willing to sell labor for $4/hr, they need it.
I wish that in an ideal world I could believe that...but I find myself just a little too worried about an oppressive monopoly selling their labor for $4/hr, not because it was necessary, but because they could exploit their workforce.)

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Libertarians claim that such and such would have happened without regulation

Not would, but could. It also could have happened sooner or later or better or worse. We don't assume that what is now under the gov't is what is best.

When the final responsibility of corporations is to it's shareholders

Which is acknowledged as part of the problem of corporatism.