Can anyone here in their right mind make a case supporting this?
Thom Tillis is clearly a fucking imbecile. There is nothing to be gained by making this optional because nobody in their right mind would prefer for the employees at the restaurant they are eating at to not wash their hands.
At best there is no improvement, and every restaurant keeps the requirement so they don’t go out of business.
To give him credit, he wasn’t actually proposing it, just arguing that if it were to happen, the free market would correct the problem. It’s an argument for the “invisible hand” that magically makes everything groovy, once we get the big wicked nasty government out of the way.
(Slavery, Jim Crow, pollution, child labor, monopolies and trusts, and insider trading not, apparently, being convincing to him.)
His proposal was to instead of having a regulation that employees wash their hands there should instead be a regulation that the restaurant put up signage saying they don’t require hand washing. His goal being instead of solving the problem with an effective government solution we should instead allow the free market to solve the problem by using an ineffective government solution.
I personally don’t want to read something akin to a credit card contract when going into a restaurant to determine if it’s safe to eat there or not, nor would I likely be capable of identifying the potential health hazards a restaurant deems acceptable. Is it ok if they use saw dust as a filler so long as they post a sign somewhere? What if I miss the fact they noted salads may be prepared on the same surface as raw chicken? If I get sick I probably won’t eat there again, If I die I definitely won’t eat there again, the free market might solve this problem if they run out of new victims.
I’m quite happy knowing that I can travel to any city in the US and eat at a restaurant and have a minimal risk of dying do to food contamination. This is possible because of government regulation. It’s something we should be using our government for.
I don’t see how changing the regulation from ‘All employees must wash their hands before returning to work’ to ‘All restaurants that don’t require employees to wash their hands before returning to work must post a sign informing their customers of this’, reduces the amount of government meddling in the free market (or whatever the senator’s alleged objective is).
You know what’s interesting about this? “Stop going to that restaurant” is not exactly a great response, because who knows *where *you got that stomach bug from? Like, on my way home from Stuttgart I got a hot dog at Yorma once, and then almost immediately after was violently ill for three days. Was it because of the hot dog? I don’t know, I also ate at a couple other sketchy restaurants the day before, and I had been a huge convention center. I’ve been to Yorma before on numerous occasions and never had a problem. The idea of a causal link here is entirely questionable, unless everyone is getting sick from it, and multiple people speak up about it. The free market solution here just doesn’t work very well at all, and that’s not even considering the external costs of things like having to stay home 3 days while you puke and shit your guts out, or people dying from this kind of thing.
I remember a great while back there was a thread about what it would take to safely order a sandwich in a libertarian society. A bit of an enlightening read. Shame I can’t find it any more.
Except that one can be checked and enforced by orders of magnitude easier than the other…
From the start of the 19th century, almost alone in the world ( except as a rich power they could ‘influence’ the rest ) the British government fought the Slave Trade, and ran the Preventative Squadron to stop it where they could. A lot of Navy sailors died. Around 17,000. They made abetting the trade a felony.
The Invisible Hand stepped in and a few British manufacturers continued making the goods Africans were traded with to sell their fellows, but now sold them to the Spanish and Portuguese — who always were the major players in slaving anyway — for them to utilize.
The British then passed a more ferocious Slave Trade Consolidation Act 1824 to cover everything they could think of. Which initially included the death penalty.
It is human nature to get away with whatever one can unless Big Daddy regulation steps in.
One party wants to make it easier for Americans to die of infectious diseases and foodborne illnesses.
The other one doesn’t.
It’s as simple as that, really.
Yeah. On the one hand, I think he’s being misconstrued; a lot of reports are making it out as though he doesn’t believe in handwashing. And that’s a little unfair to him.
On the other hand, this isn’t even a good libertarian argument. He’s still calling for a regulation, only now there’s two layers of regulation: either you put up the sign, or you’re subject to inspection at your restaurant. The only effect is has is to offer restaurants an option that no restaurant is going to take.
And these were prepared comments! He made this off-the cuff idiot pseudodefense of libertarianism to someone who’d raised a simple and strong point against libertarianism, and despite its ickiness, impracticality, and lack of libertarian virtue, he thought it was so awesome that he repeated the anecdote later.
So no, I’m really not sad that he’s being misinterpreted, and I hope for the next six years he’s called Senator Poopyhands, and then we’ll get a chance to vote him out. Way to go, dude.
Exactly. This is a textbook scenario where market solutions don’t work. Without government intervention, people cannot effectively get the information they need to make a good market based decision.
The closest you can get is a trusted restaurant rating service, and that scenario is filled with adverse incentives. Someone pays you to rate their restaurant, you have an interest in making sure they don’t go belly up as a result of your report.
Just out of curiosity, how is this regulation actually enforced? I mean… if I work at a restaurant, and don’t wash my hands after taking a dump, how is anyone ever going to know?
Sure, Seinfeld caught Pappy not washing, but how often would that ever happen IRL.
It’s always amusing how libertarianism crumbles on contact with reality. The evil government mustn’t be allowed to force restaurant workers to wash their hands, but they could force those restaurants that don’t require it to put up signs saying so, then The Great Invisible Hand Of The Free Market will fix things, as it always does.
Libertarians making these sorts of proposals their ideological battleground always boggles my mind a little bit. How in the world is “if you die from eating poison in a hot pocket, word will get out, the news will have a story, and people will know to avoid hot pockets in the future; someone will start a company that tests food for poison and puts out a publication so you know where it’s safe to eat. Or at least was safe to eat when they tested it” superior to “we made a law saying hot pockets can’t have poison in them”?
It makes everyone’s daily life into this random hodgepodge of dangerous guesses where you have to research all morning to make the most mundane decisions, and hey, maybe the information you read is outdated and you get screwed anyway. All in the name of a completely bonkers ideological opposition to any sort of regulations, no matter how obviously effective.
Well, your mind needn’t be boggled in this case since the guy being quoted (a Republican, not a Libertarian) was asked that question by someone else. He did not make it part of his “ideological battleground”.
I was in the men’s room at a local hospital cafeteria, where I was a consultant. I heard a man taking a dump in one of the stalls, and he immediately left and resumed his job in the cafeteria. I reported him to the cafeteria manager, and never saw him there again. That’s how anyone is ever going to know. But if I hadn’t been in the men’s room at that exact time, and been aware of the chain of events, nobody would have known.
And do we need an additional sign for food preparers spitting (or worse) in the food? How about allowing rats to defecate in the food? Or allowing it to fall on the floor? Or food that had been kept out in the sun for a few hours?
In my area health inspectors do their job in plain clothes. One of the things they always do is use the restaurants bathroom when they are there. If they witness an employee fail to wash their hands they can opt to close the restaurant on the spot. There is a lot of incentive for restaurant owners to take the regulation seriously as a single violation could cost them thousands of dollars in business.
Many restaurants have a sanitary sink in plain view in the kitchen and the policy is when any cook enters the kitchen they must wash their hands. This usually means a cook using the bathroom ends up having to wash their hands twice. It ensures the kitchen enforces the law to the best of their ability.
I think this is one of those regulations that give people a false sense of security since there is no practical way to enforce it short of installing cameras in the bathroom. I know if I were a non-hand-washing employee and some inspector came by and asked me whether or not I washed, I’d lie and say I did.
It’s not quite as useless as having a regulation that moms and dads wash their hands before preparing dinner for the kids at home, but it’s pretty close.
I don’t think so. See boytyperanma’s post. Also, panache45’s post points out another useful thing about the law. Customers can help enforce it.
I assume it also means restaurants are allowed to fire employees for misconduct if they don’t wash their hands, which means they don’t have to pay unemployment. It seems like there are fairly big incentives through hand-washing regulations for businesses to enforce them. That’s of course in addition to the incentive of avoiding a public relations nightmare when an establishment gets a bad reputation based on a lack of hand washing.
Do you have a cite for him saying this? I saw Jon Stewart’s bashing of this on the Daily Show, but I thought it was just Jon being funny, not something that was proposed by Tillis.
It’s a stupid idea, in any case. There are some things that the government does well, and some things that it doesn’t. The clean food and water aspects are something the government does well and that is necessary, and something that I don’t believe the free market would do as well for the public. I DO think that, eventually, the free market would ‘fix’ the issue, in that as information about a restaurant or whatever where people were getting sick gets out and people stop going there, but you have to have people getting sick or the information getting out before they can make a reasonable and informed decision to stop patronizing it…which is going to mean a lot more risk before that information gets out.