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His argument has good points, but would be a lot more convincing if presented in a less vitriolic tone. As Sgt. Friday would say "Just the facts, ma'am." This
by ssanders82 18y ago
His argument has good points, but would be a lot more convincing if presented in a less vitriolic tone. As Sgt. Friday would say "Just the facts, ma'am."
This particular situation sounds like overkill, but there are reasons we have laws concerning who can produce and sell food, and how homes must be constructed to basic safety standards. And yes, if you sell products to consumers you have to pay sales taxes.
- smanek 18y agoI don't belive that products should necessarily be held to any standard. Consumers should be informed about the safety of their product (known unsafe, unknown, certified safe, etc) and be allowed to make their own decisions. Frankly, I think that I'm better at evaluating how much risk is acceptable to me than some government bureaucrat in Washington. If a contractor offers to sell me a 800 square foot house, and I agree to buy it (knowing full well that it hasn't been certified and is smaller than legally required), how is that anyone's business but my own? I should be allowed to make my own decisions and live with the consequences of my own actions.
- mynameishere 18y agoThe 900 square foot restriction seemed pretty odd, but I have a feeling it is designed to prevent trailer parks from moving in. If you have land in the country, that is the standard nightmare scenario.
- smanek 18y agoIf I buy a plot of land free and clear, shouldn't it be my right to put a trailer on it?
- mynameishere 18y agoYes and no. I lived out in the country for a while and we had a few trailers near us. That's not a problem, and in appalachia, it's sometimes all the better people can do. The problem is trailer parks, which are sometimes okay, but sometimes are just rural ghettos, with crime and crack and meth and general bad behavior pouring out. You have a few strategies to "keep up the neighborhood". The upper class strategy is to price out the poor people. The middle class strategy is zoning, which amounts to discrimination of various kinds. The results are pretty much the same. The fact the rich people get accidentally what middle class people have to get by fiat causes political confusion.
- Alex3917 18y agoThere's no such thing as buying a plot of land free and clear, at least in the US. You're buying a set of rights, not the land itself. What those rights are is a function of local, state, and federal laws, the contract, and any restrictions put on the land previously. That said, you can always build a barn and then put the trailer in the barn.
- noonespecial 18y agoYou're also not buying, you're leasing your land from the government. If you fail to pay your lease fees, the government will evict you and lease the land to someone else. Yes they call it "taxes and zoning rules" but in practice it simply operates as a landlord charging rent and telling the tenant what they are and are not allowed to do with the landlord's property. If it walks like a duck...
- mechanical_fish 18y agoSure, if you don't mind the smell from the nuclear-powered mercury reclamation plant that I'm putting up next door. Sorry about the noise, BTW, but the lot on the other side of yours is the perfect location for our CEO's private helipad. (Incidentally, if you were really asking me about a shed, and not merely trying to bait us onto some slippery slope to anarchy... I rather like small cottages and would like to put one up myself. So I'd be pretty sympathetic at your zoning board meeting. Ultimately, I'm guessing that zoning boards exist only because people were historically unwilling to just ask their neighbors first and abide by their preferences. And zoning boards can still be overridden if enough of your neighbors agree. It's called a "variance".)
- lbrandy 18y ago> If a contractor offers to sell me a 800 square foot house, and I agree to buy it (knowing full well that it hasn't been certified and is smaller than legally required) Because knowing 'full well' implies you knew what questions to ask. And requiring everyone to know all the questions they need to ask in every transaction is not only unreasonable but wasteful. How many things need to be "fully" disclosed so that I can make an informed decision when buying milk? The whole purpose of regulation is to have a group of people who are asking those questions for us.
- smanek 18y agoI think that private certification agencies (think consumer reports on steroids) could take the place of regulations. I could either buy a gallon of milk that is certified by an agency I trust for a little more, or pay less (and ask my own questions) for an uncertified gallon. And if a manufacturer chose not to disclose all relevant information, then I can choose not buy their product (and certification agencies will not certify it) Not to mention that it isn't in any firm's economic interest to provide a patently unsafe product.
- pohart 18y agothe problem is that no milk will be uncertified. There will be certain certifiers that will certify anything, and it will be extremely difficult for a buyer to tell the difference. Look at something like eggs. People pay more for eggs because they are "free range", but free range just means that they have access to the range, not that they are capable of using that access. And it is in firms interest to provide a patently unsafe product as long as not enough people are lost due to the unsafe product to counteract the savings. without regulation it would be much harder to determine the cause of the problem. If I am exposed to e-coli due to lettuce or spinach (each certified by a different agency), I won't know. I'll assume it was from my overeasy eggs or rare beef, or because the cook doesn't wash his hands. the farmer could go on selling tainted vegetables for quite a long time before the cause is found.
- smanek 18y ago
- scott_s 18y agoPeople would buy "known unsafe" products. They would presumably be cheaper, and some people would risk it. When the product is something like beef, very bad things would happen, and it would have potential to impact the rest of the community.
- mhb 18y agoVery bad things happen when you make regulations. The cost of all goods is higher because they all must comply. That means that there are people who can't afford the cost of the regulated goods who could eat more if the goods were available which met a lower regulatory threshold which was still acceptable to them. Why do you assume that the current regulatory tradeoff between safety and cost is the right one for everyone?
- scott_s 18y agoBecause the alternative leads to exploitation - both of the consumer and the worker. Companies will cut costs any legal way they can. If you make it legal for them to be unsafe, they will be. The counter argument are market forces, but I don't think that works here. It assumes a completely rational consumer who understands the risk they are taking. We're not that rational, and generally don't understand the risks. We didn't always have safety regulations. Bad things happened.
- mhb 18y agoDid you ever buy vegetables from a roadside stand or a neighbor's tomatoes? Did you rely on the existence of a government agency to ensure that they were safe to eat? I can buy $5/lb tomatoes at Whole Foods or $2/lb tomatoes at Stop & Shop. Apparently Whole Foods perceives a market for food which isn't the lowest price possible. People will differentiate based on quality just as they do for safety. They don't need to be completely rational - they need to be minimally rational. The point of the original article is that regulations lead to more problems - they are not just a response to, but also encourage the centralization of factory food production just like you read about in Fast Food Nation.
- Alex3917 18y ago>Frankly, I think that I'm better at evaluating how much risk is acceptable to me than some government bureaucrat in Washington. Then you would love living in China. I guess going to a restaurant or grocery store where much of the food contains various poisons wouldn't bother you, since you're able to tell the difference.
- mechanical_fish 18y agoI was going to say: Relaxing the food regulations isn't some kind of brilliant new idea. It's been tried before, and in some countries it's still being tried. If the Chinese cat food stories from last year aren't scary enough for you, try reading Sinclair's The Jungle... or the slaughterhouse chapter of Fast Food Nation.
- astine 18y agoSure, but you do realize that "The Jungle" was a deliberate load of muckraking bull? The whole book was about poor working conditions in American factories and to drive the point home, Sinclair described a guy falling into the lard vats and getting eaten. There was no truth to the health claims but the concept of eating people freaked out European importers so much that the US was forced to create FDA (Or its predecessor, I don't remember precisely.) The first reports found no evidence of Sinclair's claims. The ironic thing is that Sinclair was hoping to spark a socialist revolution and improve the lives of the slaughterhouse workers. What happened was that the inspection agencies added to cost to the production process and actually lowered the standard of living for the workers.
- lg 18y agomaybe you could do that in the US, where the threat of lawsuits might keep people honest. but i wouldn't risk it. seems like the problem this essay is pointing out is that the laws aren't fine-grained enough to distinguish between industrial farms and mom-and-pops. But probably, if there WERE such a distinction and mom-and-pops got off easy, corporate agriculture would bend over backwards to meet the technical definition. if the law said people can sell uncertified stuff on the farm premises, there'd be a little hen house in the back of every shoprite (or whatever), just like with the suv fuel efficiency restrictions. perhaps one way around that, though, is that since all corporations are (if anything) corporations, the law could single out food that's been handled by employees of registered corporations for special treatment. but who knows, they'd probably find a way around that too.
- timr 18y agoI think you've made the critical argument: the law is a blunt instrument, because there are people who will abuse the intricacies of anything less. This entire comment thread fascinates me, because it seems to consist of repeated jabs at "absurd" laws by cranky libertarians (or anarchists), followed by parries by people who can see reasonable arguments for said laws. Rarely does the debate rise to the level where it is acknowledged that sometimes good laws have unintended absurd consequences, and that just because a law prevents you from doing something you want to do, doesn't mean that the law is invalid (or an inappropriate intrusion of government into daily life).
- peteg 18y agoIt is more than the law is a blunt instrument. When it comes to food laws it is a blunt instrument whose only efficacious purpose is to raise the barrier to entry so high that small operators with truly clean and environmentally sound food can't compete (if they are even legal to begin with).
- xirium 18y agoI've seen a similar argument. If an employee agrees to work for less than a statutory minimum wage, does it matter? Yes, because it makes it harder for anyone else to get a better income.